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About this lesson
Identify the terminology and elements of the Ribbon.
Quick reference
The Ribbon
Identifying the terminology and elements of the Ribbon.
When to use
Use to understand the terminology and elements of the Ribbon.
Instructions
The Quick Access Toolbar (QAT)
- This is the single row of icons at the top left of the screen
- Gives one-click access to your most used commands
- To add more commands to the QAT, click the down arrow on the right end of the small icons
The Ribbon
- Made up of Tabs, Groups, and Commands
- Tabs are used to hold groups of similar natures
- Groups are collections of related controls
- Controls can consist of buttons, menus, and galleries
Dialog Box Launchers
- Located in the bottom right corner of many (but not all) groups
- Look like little arrows in boxes
- Launch advanced options for the group
Keyboard Navigation
- All ribbon commands can be activated by the keyboard
- Press the ALT key, then type the series of letters that lead you through the tabs to your commands
Dynamic Resizing
- The Ribbon dynamically resizes depending on the screen size
- Groups and controls will collapse into smaller versions so that all commands fit on screen
- 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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