The Ribbon

Quick reference

• 00:04 Before we dive into writing formulas and building charts,
• 00:07 I want to talk a little bit about the ribbon.
• 00:10 The user interface that you see up the top here that we're going to be working with
• 00:14 as we go through our Excel journey.
• 00:16 I'm going to start by sort of breaking this down a little bit,
• 00:19 because there's a few different components to the ribbon here.
• 00:21 The first one is this little chunk of the very top here which is what we
• 00:25 refer to as the QAT or a Quick Access Toolbar.
• 00:28 And you'll notice that we have the File Name here tell us when it was last saved,
• 00:32 there's a search bar, some information about my account that I'm logged in with.
• 00:35 The really important part is this one, because these little icons here are your
• 00:39 quick hits to get into things very quickly.
• 00:41 Like for example Save As which I've actually added to my QAT.
• 00:46 Now, this area here is completely customizable.
• 00:49 You can actually click the little drop down button here.
• 00:51 And you'll notice that I've added Print Preview and Print, that's this one here,
• 00:55 it takes me to My Print Preview.
• 00:56 Maybe I want to add something like the Undo button, I can click on that and
• 01:00 it'll bring me the Undo.
• 01:01 But I've also added some additional components like this one.
• 01:05 Which will actually send feedback to Microsoft,
• 01:07 if I find a bug in the software.
• 01:08 Now, you don't need to do that, but this is something that I do regularly.
• 01:12 To find something like that, we go to quick access toolbar.
• 01:16 And we go to more commands and basically,
• 01:19 every command that you can think of inside Excel is here.
• 01:23 So if we look under popular commands,
• 01:25 you'll also find commands that aren't in the ribbon or all commands.
• 01:28 You'd basically hunt down for the thing that you want and say, you know what?
• 01:31 Maybe I want to turn 3D on and off, and I do that regularly.
• 01:34 I can click Add and it's going to put it right on the QAT.
• 01:37 Now, I don't use this, so I'm just going to get rid of it by clicking Remove.
• 01:41 We'll go and say, OK, and we're back where we want to be.
• 01:45 Something else about the QAT, if you prefer,
• 01:48 you can actually show this below the ribbon.
• 01:50 So it shows it down the bottom here, or you can move it back up to the top
• 01:55 show Above the Ribbon, which is where I actually prefer it.
• 01:59 The next layer of things you're going to see in your user interface is your
• 02:03 ribbon tabs.
• 02:04 And when we talk about the ribbon,
• 02:05 we're really talking about this big chunk here, okay?
• 02:08 So we have a Home tab, an Insert tab, I've got a Draw tab, and
• 02:12 a Page Layout tab, formulas.
• 02:14 So all kinds of different tabs, and basically, what happens here
• 02:18 is that Microsoft's tried to group like commands into different tabs.
• 02:22 And then within those into different groups.
• 02:24 So you can see here we have a whole bunch of stuff that's around functions and
• 02:28 a whole bunch of stuff here around Define Names.
• 02:30 So Define Name is a group that we have with some buttons that
• 02:34 have different drop-downs and things.
• 02:36 If I go back to the Home tab,
• 02:38 you'll notice that we have little drop-down buttons here.
• 02:41 We have drop-down buttons beside some of the little icons and cells.
• 02:44 And in this case, we even have a much more robust gallery of all kinds of
• 02:48 different options that are here as well.
• 02:51 So you'll want to look for these little drop-down arrows in different places
• 02:54 when you're looking for different commands.
• 02:56 Because they give you much more options to do different things.
• 02:59 Now, this is interesting in that we have all these tabs here, but
• 03:03 there's another set of tabs that shows up sometimes.
• 03:07 And we actually call these contextual tabs and
• 03:10 they only show up when a specific object is selected or in scope.
• 03:14 For example, down the bottom here I have something which is an official Excel table
• 03:18 and we'll talk about those a little bit later in the course.
• 03:21 But when I actually click inside it,
• 03:23 you'll see that we get a new tab here called table design.
• 03:26 And if I click on that now,
• 03:28 it's got all commands which are specific to this particular table object.
• 03:33 If I click outside of the table, that tab goes away.
• 03:36 And if I click back inside of the table, the table design tab comes back, okay?
• 03:40 So this is what we call a contextual tab that only shows up when
• 03:44 a given command is in context.
• 03:47 I'm going to go back to the Home tab now, because there's one more piece that I'd
• 03:50 like to show you here that's really, really important.
• 03:53 It's kind of a hidden little thing.
• 03:54 So on our Ribbon tabs, within our groups at the bottom of some of the groups,
• 03:59 you'll notice that we have this funky little icon that looks like a square with
• 04:03 an arrow in it.
• 04:04 And you'll see there's a few of these things around in different
• 04:07 areas here, okay?
• 04:08 So if I now go and
• 04:09 click on one of these, what happens is it actually pops up a dialog box.
• 04:13 We actually refer to this little tiny box here as aa dialog box launcher.
• 04:18 And inside these dialog boxes, you'll find much more advanced and
• 04:22 granular control over different things.
• 04:24 So maybe not all of the border options fit into this tiny little area on
• 04:29 the ribbon up here.
• 04:30 So they've given you much more ability to get a lot more detailed with the way
• 04:34 things are actually set up.
• 04:35 So if you're looking for more detailed control, specific to an object,
• 04:39 you can actually look for a dialog box launcher.
• 04:42 The trick with these ones here.
• 04:44 If I go and click on the one for Font,
• 04:46 it actually takes me into the Format Cells dialog on the Font tab.
• 04:50 If I go and click on the one for Number,
• 04:52 it takes me into the Format Cells dialog on the Number tab.
• 04:55 But here's Font, we can actually move back and forth between these.
• 04:58 It's just a quick way to get into the appropriate dialogue here.
• 05:02 Another thing that you might be interested in if you're into keyboarding here.
• 05:06 If we press the ALT key,
• 05:08 you'll notice that we actually get a bunch of little pop ups that show up here.
• 05:12 So if I want to get into say that Page Layout menu right now, I can type P and
• 05:16 at this point it shows up all of these little icons here as well.
• 05:20 So if I wanted to go into something like,
• 05:22 I don't know, setting up margins, I could press M.
• 05:25 And it will actually allow me to drill down and at this point, it looks like I
• 05:28 don't have any more keyboard items that I can navigate through.
• 05:31 So I'm going to use my arrow keys up or down, and
• 05:33 then press Enter in order to actually change something or Esc to get rid of it.
• 05:37 But just be aware that you actually can navigate through these things.
• 05:40 If there are two things like Size, we'd press S said and
• 05:44 that will get us into that menu as well.
• 05:46 Press Esc a couple of times and it'll actually go back out there.
• 05:49 So you have a keyboarding ability as well.
• 05:52 The last thing I want to show you about the ribbon is something that will, well,
• 05:56 honestly, it's sometimes mess with your mind, okay?
• 05:58 So when we look at this screen right now,
• 06:01 we can see all kinds of different groups and buttons going across the top.
• 06:05 What I'm going to show you now is I'm actually going to minimize this down
• 06:07 a little bit.
• 06:08 So let me just go here, there we are.
• 06:11 This is the same screen and you can see behind it the original Home tab.
• 06:15 What happens is when Microsoft doesn't have enough room to display all
• 06:18 the items in the Ribbon, it starts dynamically collapsing them, okay?
• 06:22 So you'll notice that we have an editing group here with all kinds of stuff in it.
• 06:26 Here, we have an Editing menu and if you click on it,
• 06:29 all of the commands are still here.
• 06:31 They're just sort of buried and hidden underneath things.
• 06:33 Our Cell Styles group for example, Conditional Formatting, Format as Table,
• 06:37 they both show up here.
• 06:38 But this Gallery gets collapsed down to an individual item.
• 06:41 If I go and click on it, you can see the commands are all still here.
• 06:44 So if you ever looking at one of my videos and you don't see the exact same buttons.
• 06:49 One of the reasons may be is because your screen resolution isn't sufficient to show
• 06:53 it at the same width.
• 06:54 And therefore is collapse things down, the commands are still there,
• 06:57 they're just a little bit buried.
• 06:58 That's just a little bit of fun that Microsoft has to mess with your mind.

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