Hello again and welcome back to our course on Word 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look a little bit more closely at the Ribbon.
I’ve mentioned the Ribbon a couple of times and if you haven’t used a recent Microsoft
Office program, you may be unfamiliar with the Ribbon.
Even if you have there are some important changes in this version of Word and Office.
So let’s deal with what is probably the most important change first.
If you look above the Ribbon on this little bar, the top left here, the Quick Access Toolbar,
there is a pointing finger icon.
And this says Touch/Mouse Mode as its screen tip.
And this is the way that you switch the Ribbon between touch and mouse mode.
Now the main difference between touch and mouse mode is that when Microsoft looked at
Office 2013, they decided one of the problems with accommodating touch is that the commands
on the Ribbon, all these buttons you can see grayed out here, all of this, these are far
too close together for many people’s fingers.
If you’ve got fairly fat fingers like mine, it’s quite difficult to pick out a particular
command.
So if you click on or tap on that command, Touch/Mouse Mode watch what happens to the
Ribbon.
You get a choice between mouse where you’ve got standard Ribbon commands, this is optimized
for use with the mouse, and then you get more space between the commands.
So this is optimized for use with touch.
So I’m going to tap on that, now watch what happens to the Ribbon.
You can see that everything is spaced out much more.
Now there is a price to pay for this if you’re using touch and that is that the Ribbon itself
takes up more space on the screen, but I’ll come back to that point in just a moment.
The first thing is if you’re using touch, you may want to have the Ribbon set that way.
I’m going to set the Ribbon back at mouse mode.
But everything I’m talking about from now on in relation to the Ribbon, etc. is exactly
the same for both.
It’s really only a question of whether you want more space so that you can tap on the
commands more easily if you’re using touch.
So let me just go back into mouse mode.
So now let me open one of the previous documents.
Let’s just open Hello World again.
And let’s talk about what’s on the Ribbon.
The Ribbon is effectively divided into what are called Tabs and the names of the tabs
are along the top here.
One of the tabs will have this sort of rectangle around it.
It’s sort of highlighted.
That’s the highlighted tab.
Currently that’s the Home tab.
If I click on the word Insert, that’s the Insert tab.
Design tab, Page Layout tab, References, and so on.
Now there are in fact several other tabs and you can’t see them at the moment.
They are available but you can’t see them.
I’ll come back to that in just a moment.
On each tab there are a number of Groups and the groups are the words written along the
bottom of the Ribbon itself.
So if you look at that tab there, the References tab, there’s a group on the left and it’s
called the Table of Contents Group and it’s got three commands in it: Table of Contents,
Add Text, and Update Table.
The next group along is the Footnotes Group.
Again, a number of commands: Insert Footnote, Insert Endnote, Next Footnote, and so on.
So on each tab, you have a number of groups.
Within each group you have commands.
And the commands are sometimes things like a single button you push, so something like
Insert Endnote.
Looks like just a single button.
Sometimes it’s a little bit more complicated than that, but basically that’s a command.
Some of the buttons, like for instance Table of Contents over here on the left have a little
drop down on them somewhere and if you click on or near the little drop down, what you
find is that you get a number of options to choose from.
It’s not just one command that does one thing.
It gives you a range of options to choose from.
And within that range of options that you choose from a menu and we’ll be looking
at Table of Contents later in the course, you can have still further menus, commands,
dialogs, and so on to follow in order to achieve what you want to achieve.
So that’s the basic structure of the Ribbon.
Now one important point to note as you look at the Ribbon here is that some of the commands,
for instance Show Notes in the Footnotes Group, are grayed out.
If I click on Show Notes it doesn’t do anything, it’s not enabled.
In any given situation some commands will be enabled and some will not be enabled.
So for instance I could insert a Table of Contents here in this document.
I could add text.
I could update Table, but I couldn’t Show Notes.
So at any time, you can’t do absolutely everything everywhere on the Ribbon.
Some of the commands will be enabled, some of them won’t be.
And that brings me to another important point.
I currently have just the words Hello World in this document.
What I’m going to do is to put a picture into it.
So I’m going to click on Insert, click on Pictures.
Let’s put a picture of a wombat in there.
Now with that picture of the wombat selected, you can see the rectangle and the sizing handles
around it.
There is another tab now.
This tab just appeared on the Ribbon.
It’s called Format and it wasn’t there before.
And that tab specifically is used for formatting pictures.
If I have a picture selected, I will see the format tab so that I can format that picture.
If I clicked away from the picture, say I clicked in the middle of the phrase Hello
World, note that tabs disappeared again.
Now I mentioned just now that you always see these tabs and there are others.
Well there’s an example of another tab.
It’s what’s called a Contextual tab.
It’s only there in context.
If you have a picture selected, you get that Picture Tools Format tab.
I’ll come back to that later on in the course.
The thing to tell you about the Ribbon is you’ve seen the tabs, you’ve seen the
tabs that are always there and you see that some of the tabs appear from time to time.
And you’ve seen that each tab is divided into groups and then within the groups you’ve
got commands.
In many of the groups in the bottom right hand corner, there’s a little square icon
there and that is what’s called a dialog box Launcher.
And if you’re familiar say with an older version of Word, you may have formatted a
paragraph.
So you may have seen justification settings, things for doing a list, doing background
colors, borders, and so on.
And you may be familiar with a Paragraph dialog.
And you may be quite like using a Paragraph dialog.
Well the dialogs haven’t all gone in Word 2013 and that’s what this little box in
the bottom right hand corner here does.
Because watch what happens if I click on that little box.
That launches a Paragraph dialog and there you have a control which is probably quite
like the ones you’re used to in the older version of Word that you may be familiar with.
Now some people are perfectly happy using the commands on the Ribbon, some people like
to use the dialogs, some people like one in one situation and one in another.
The dialog are still there and that’s what you use the dialog box Launcher for in many
of the groups.
Now I mentioned earlier on in this section that the Ribbon does take up space on the
screen.
And particularly if you’re using touch and you have the touch version of the Ribbon where
everything is spaced out more, you may be in a position where the Ribbon is using up
more space on the screen than you’d like it to.
Now there is a way of effectively hiding the Ribbon while still using it and, in fact,
there’s a couple of ways of doing it.
And let’s take a quick look at those now.
First of all, if you look at the Ribbon, towards the right hand end down here there’s a little
sort of chevron, Collapse the Ribbon.
Watch what happens if I click that.
What happened is the Ribbon itself pretty much disappears.
What you see is just the tabs.
Now if you’ve been using Word 2013 for a while, you’ll probably know what’s on
each tab and you don’t really need to hunt around to find what you need.
Early on this may be quite a difficult way to work.
But if you know a particular command is say on a particular tab; so let’s suppose you
wanted to insert another picture after Hello World, you know that you insert a picture
using the Insert tab.
Click on Insert, the Ribbon reappears, the commands reappear.
You could maybe insert your picture.
Let’s say I now put in kangaroos and once you’ve done that, the Ribbon disappears
again.
You’ve still got the tabs but the Ribbon itself disappears again.
So the Ribbon appears long enough for you to choose the command or to click on the dialog
box Launcher that you need, but then when you’ve done what you want to do, it disappears
again.
Now if you’ve chosen that option for hiding the Ribbon, to bring it back at any time,
click on View and then you’ll see an alternative little icon here in the bottom right here
which says “Pin the Ribbon”.
Click on Pin the Ribbon and the Ribbon is back on display again and now when you execute
a command it will stay visible.
Now the second way of doing pretty much the same thing but with an added twist is to use
this little button to the right of the Help button.
If you look at the top of the display up here, there is a Ribbon display options button.
If you click on that, there are three options.
The bottom option is Show tabs and commands which is what we have now; that’s the default.
The middle option, Show tabs, is what we achieved just now where all you could see was the tabs.
But the top option is Auto-hide Ribbon, hide the Ribbon, and then click at the top of the
application to show it.
I’m not going to do this now.
It’s one for you to try out yourself.
If you choose this option, what happens is the Ribbon and the tabs disappear and you
have pretty much the whole of the screen space to work in.
And then all you need to do is to put the cursor at the top of the screen, you’ll
find a little triple dot at the top as well, hover over that, click, and you will see the
Ribbon reappear.
So that’s an alternative, slightly more flexible version, and a way of getting yourself
a bit more screen space to work in.
And finally on the Ribbon, I’d like to show you just one other thing.
If you right click somewhere in a space on the Ribbon, I’m choosing a space just over
on the right here, right click on that.
There is an option, Customize the Ribbon, and that takes you into the Word Options.
One of the pages we didn’t look at before was Customize Ribbon.
Now customizing the Ribbon is outside the scope of this course, although we are going
to very quickly look at customizing the Quick Access Toolbar in the next section.
But with this page in the Word Options, you can customize the Ribbon.
You could create your own tab.
You can create your own groups and you can move any of the Word commands into those groups.
There’s a limit to what you can do to the existing tabs and groups, but you can certainly
make your own and customize your own.
The other point to make here is that if you look at the list on the right, this currently
shows you the tabs that exist now.
As we’ve seen already some of them are contextual, so you haven’t seen them yet.
You’ll only see them when you take some sort of appropriate action like inserting
a picture.
But one of the tabs, the Developer tab, is not checked.
There is a standard tab which is used when you come to write VBA, write Macros to use
with Word.
And if you wanted to use VBA and Macros with Word, you’d probably want to enable that
tab just by checking it to enable it.
But with the other tabs, Customize the Ribbon, main tabs, the list of tabs here, all tabs
would include contextual tabs such as the one we saw before on the Picture Tools, the
Format tab.
So as I say, customizing the Ribbon is outside the scope of this course but it’s pretty
straightforward.
It may be something you want to look into yourself.
So that’s it on the Ribbon.
Let’s take a look in the next section at the Quick Access Toolbar.