About the Ribbon

Quick reference

• 00:04 As you can see in the ribbon,
• 00:05 there's a number of tabs that go across the top of the screen.
• 00:09 Let's talk about the one really unique one, which is the File tab.
• 00:14 These other tabs display icons underneath them.
• 00:17 When I click the File tab, It opens up a whole new page.
• 00:21 And this page is what we call the backstage.
• 00:23 Now you're not going to see the word backstage anywhere.
• 00:28 But Microsoft refers to it this way, so we'll refer to it that way as well.
• 00:33 So the Backstage is a full page that allows us to do things like get
• 00:38 the information on the project, create new projects, print,
• 00:42 share, export, and much, much more.
• 00:45 We'll talk a lot about the features of the Backstage and future lessons.
• 00:50 Now when the Backstage is open, as you can see,
• 00:52 I can't really see the rest of the Microsoft Project user interface.
• 00:56 So how do I get back?
• 00:57 There's two ways to do that.
• 00:59 The first is to click this arrow icon at the top left of the screen, and
• 01:04 I'll do that right now.
• 01:05 And that brings me back to Microsoft Project.
• 01:08 If I click this File tab again and go back to the backstage, there's one
• 01:13 other way to get out, and that's to press the Escape or Esc key on your keyboard.
• 01:19 So I'm going to press the Escape key on my keyboard right now.
• 01:22 And you can see that did the same thing as clicking the back arrow icon.
• 01:27 Located to the right of the File tab are a number of other tabs.
• 01:32 I'm going to talk about the default out of the box tabs that you received first.
• 01:37 Those are task, resource report, project and view.
• 01:43 We'll talk about this format tab in just a little bit.
• 01:47 What's important to note with these tabs, is Microsoft tried to logically
• 01:52 group certain activities that you'd perform into these various tabs.
• 01:57 So if you want to work with tasks, you'd click the Task tab.
• 02:01 If you're doing some work with resources, you'd click the Resource tab.
• 02:05 You creating a report or modifying or printing a report,
• 02:09 you come to the Report tab, and so on.
• 02:12 Tabs are logically grouped, to focus you on certain activities.
• 02:17 Well, to perform those activities, you need some icons that you can select and
• 02:22 there's a lot of them.
• 02:23 You can see here just on the task tab,
• 02:26 there's maybe even more than two dozen icons.
• 02:29 But what you'll see here is that they're logically grouped.
• 02:32 And these logical groupings are located here.
• 02:35 So you can see, for example, this is a scheduled grouping and
• 02:40 this allows you to do things like schedule the task at 50% or 100%.
• 02:45 There's an insert grouping then allows you to create new tasks.
• 02:48 So for example, I'll just go ahead and click that icon.
• 02:52 You can see a new task was created.
• 02:56 One of the important things that you should know about the Tasks tab is
• 03:00 that this section over here is really focused on activities
• 03:04 that you might perform anywhere.
• 03:06 So for example, here's the copy, and cut, and paste icons,
• 03:11 you'd use that throughout Microsoft Project.
• 03:15 So you might find yourself in the Task tab,
• 03:18 even if you're not necessarily doing tasks related activities.
• 03:22 But everything to the right of this font grouping are things that
• 03:26 you'll be selecting focus just on working with tasks.
• 03:31 This is a contextual tab.
• 03:34 And what is that?
• 03:34 This Format tab here is only displaying because I happen to be in a Gantt
• 03:39 chart related view.
• 03:41 How do I know that?
• 03:42 If I look over here on the left side of the screen, you can see Gantt chart.
• 03:47 And so project knows that I'm in this special Gantt chart view.
• 03:50 And I'll talk a lot more about using the Gantt chart in future lessons.
• 03:55 But what it does know is that since it's in a Gantt chart view,
• 03:59 there's certain ways I might want to format the screen.
• 04:03 Let me go to the Report tab and create a report.
• 04:06 Now it no longer says Gantt chart tools,
• 04:09 it says Report tools and there's this Design tab.
• 04:13 Now you can have many contextual tabs.
• 04:15 So if I click on this chart area, and
• 04:18 if I had data inside my project this chart would be filled in.
• 04:22 But if I click it, you can see now we have two design tabs.
• 04:25 One design tab is focused on managing the report itself, the colors,
• 04:30 the theme, inserting shapes.
• 04:32 The other is focused just on the chart that I created.
• 04:36 So if I go ahead and click there now, you can see is just formatting the chart.
• 04:41 So those are contextual tabs.
• 04:44 There's two other areas that I mentioned are not really part of the ribbon, but
• 04:48 you should consider them part of the ribbon area anyway.
• 04:52 This is the Quick Access toolbar, which is on the left to Save, Undo and Redo.
• 04:57 You can actually customize this and
• 04:59 I'll show you how to do that in a future lesson.
• 05:02 And now we'll talk about two last items.
• 05:04 If you're familiar with older versions of projects,
• 05:07 you know that the Help icon used to be at the top right corner of the screen.
• 05:10 Now it has its own tab.
• 05:12 You can explore all these other menu icons that are displayed here, but
• 05:16 let's click on help.
• 05:17 That opens up the side panel.
• 05:19 And if I type for example, reporting and press Enter,
• 05:23 you can see I can quickly get to how to create a report.
• 05:26 To close the side panel because it does take up a lot of space,
• 05:30 click the x icon to the right of the word, help.
• 05:33 Finally, at the top right hand corner of the screen,
• 05:36 I want to point out this x icon.
• 05:38 If you're familiar with much older versions of Project,
• 05:41 you might be used to coming over here to the File menu and choosing Exit.
• 05:46 That does not exist anymore, so
• 05:48 you have to click the X icon up here to exit Project.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.