About the Ribbon

Quick reference

• 00:04 As we 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, but when I click the file tab,
• 00:19 it opens up a whole new page and this page is what we call the backstage.
• 00:24 Now you're not going to see the word backstage anywhere, but
• 00:28 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
• 00:38 get 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 in future lessons.
• 00:50 Now when the backstage is open, as you can see, I can’t really see the rest of
• 00:54 the Microsoft Project user interface, so how do I get back?
• 00:58 There's two ways to do that.
• 01:00 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 other way to
• 01:13 get out, and that's to press the escape or ESC key on your keyboard.
• 01:19 So I'm gonna 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 group
• 01:52 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 click the resource tab.
• 02:06 You’re creating a report, or modifying or printing a report,
• 02:08 you come to the report tab, and so on.
• 02:13 Tabs are logically grouped to focus you on certain activities.
• 02:18 Well, to perform those activities you need some icons that you can select and
• 02:22 there's a lot of them.
• 02:23 And you can see here just on the task tab there is
• 02:26 maybe even more than two dozen icons.
• 02:29 But what you'll see here is that they're logically grouped and
• 02:33 these logical groupings are located here.
• 02:36 So you can see for example this is a schedule grouping, and
• 02:39 this allows you to do things like schedule the task at 50% or 100%.
• 02:44 There’s an insert grouping that allows you to create new tasks.
• 02:49 So for example, I’ll just go ahead and click that icon,
• 02:51 and you can see a new task was created.
• 02:56 One of the important things that you should know about the task tab
• 02:59 is that this section over here is really focused on
• 03:04 activities that you might perform anywhere.
• 03:06 So for example, here's the Copy and Cut and Paste icons.
• 03:12 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 task related activities.
• 03:22 But everything to the right of this font grouping are things that you'll selecting,
• 03:27 focused just on working with tasks.
• 03:31 This is a contextual tab and what is that?
• 03:35 This Format tab here is only displaying because I happen to be in a Gantt Chart
• 03:40 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 the special Gantt Chart view, and
• 03:51 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 Gannt Chart view,
• 03:58 there are certain ways I might want to format the screen.
• 04:02 Let me go to the report tab and create a report.
• 04:06 Now it no longer says Gannt Chart Tools, it says Report Tools.
• 04:11 And there's the Design tab.
• 04:12 Now you can have many contextual tabs.
• 04:16 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.
• 04:26 One Design tab is focused on managing the report itself, the colors,
• 04:31 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 it's just formatting the chart.
• 04:42 So those are contextual tabs.
• 04:44 There's two other areas that I mentioned are not really part of the ribbon, but
• 04:49 you should consider them part of the ribbon area anyway.
• 04:52 This is the Quick Access toolbar, which is on the left.
• 04:55 There's Save, Undo, and Redo.
• 04:57 You can actually customize this, and
• 05:00 I'll show you how to do that in a future lesson.
• 05:02 And then over here on the right is an online Help icon.
• 05:06 So I can go ahead and click this, and if I need help, for example, on that burndown
• 05:10 report that I was just working on, it can pull up online help for that.
• 05:16 And then most importantly, at the top right, is this X button.
• 05:20 The very top right X button actually exits Microsoft Project.
• 05:25 Why is this important?
• 05:26 You might think, well I can always go to the File>Exit menu option, and
• 05:30 no, we don't actually have that anymore.
• 05:33 Remember we have the File tab, which it brings us to the back stage and
• 05:36 there is no Exit option anywhere here.
• 05:40 So the way you exit Microsoft Project is to click this X button.
• 05:46 So that was a general overview of the ribbon bar area.
• 05:49 You'll be using this throughout the rest of the lessons, and
• 05:52 I'll teach you a lot more as we go through this course.

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