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Jan's Working with Words

Interface: Ribbon Tabs

The ribbon in Office programs runs across the top of the program window and contains tabs which hold tab groups of items that are related.

Word 2010: Home tab
Ribbon: Home (Word 2010)

For example, the Home tab shown above has the tab groups Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Styles, and Editing. Each group holds items that are related. So the Font group has buttons for formatting text like font, font size, bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, subscript, superscript, etc.

The default tabs for the ribbon in Word are:

Home Format text, Cut, Copy, Paste, Find, Replace
Insert Insert an object - image, table, shape, symbol,
header/footer
Design Themes, Style sets, Color sets, Font sets, Page Background
Page Layout Margins, sections, orientation, themes
References Create sources, footnotes, bibliography entries,
table of contents
Mailings Envelopes, address labels, mail merge
Review Spelling and grammar, thesaurus, translation, track changes
View Select a view, arrange windows

If you have an Office 365 subscription, you will have a Draw tab. Tools on the Draw tab let you annotate with a finger or stylus on a touch screen or even draw shapes. Explanation from Microsoft

Context tabs become available as needed, such as Drawing Tools, which appears when you insert or select a Drawing shape. This keeps the ribbon from getting entirely too full!

We have already seen part of the View ribbon on the Views page. In these lessons we will get very familiar with the Home tab and specific features on some other tabs plus what you can do from the Office button or File tab.

What's that button for?

Ribbon: Popup tip - Change Case (Word 2010) To find out what an item on a ribbon tab is actually for, just hover the mouse pointer over the button. A screen tip will appear below the ribbon. It tells you the name of the command and usually more information.

Ribbon buttons are grayed out if they cannot be used on the current selection. (Word 2010) Problem: A control on the ribbon is gray and does not work.
Grayed out controls are not available right now.

Solution: Select the object or text that you want first. Then the controls that make sense for your selection will be active.

Example: In the illustration at the right, an AutoShape is selected, so the buttons for formatting text are grayed out. But Paste, Cut, Copy, and Format Painter are still active because you can use those on a shape.

If the shape contains text, then the text formatting tools will still be active.

Click a Ribbon Object...

What happens when a ribbon object is clicked? It depends!

Command Button:
Performs an action, like making selected text bold or opening a pane.

Buttons: Bold, Italic (Word 2010) or Word 2007:

Menu:
An arrow under an icon drops a menu of commands, like this one for what to delete.

Drop list:
A down arrow at the right of a button drops a list of choices for a single characteristic, like font size or borders.

Dialog Box Launcher:
The tiny diagonal arrow button at bottom right of a ribbon group opens a dialog or a pane related to the group on the ribbon. The illustrations show buttons for launching the Font dialog and the Style pane.