Welcome back to our course on Project 2016.
In this section we’re going to look at the Ribbon and Toolbars.
If you’ve used other Microsoft software that uses the Ribbon and Toolbars it’s probably
the case that you can skip this section if you want to.
I will talk about one or two things that are quite specific to Microsoft Project but I
think that if you’re an experienced user of the Ribbon you’ll be able to pick these
up easily enough as we go along anyway.
Now for those of you who aren’t so familiar with the Ribbon let me just explain.
The Ribbon system was introduced well about eight or nine years ago now by step by step
through the various components of Microsoft Office.
And it’s now fairly fully and fairly consistently implemented in these components, including
Project.
As I pointed out already, it’s this rectangle with a number of tabs.
And you select a tab.
So for instance at the moment I have the Report Tab selected.
You select a tab by clicking on the name.
So this is the Task Tab, this is the Resource Tab, and so on.
In most of Project there’s a whole bunch of tabs, Task, Resource, Report, Project,
that you will see whenever you’re using Project.
Now this can be changed by local settings but talking in general terms here.
But there are some tabs that only appear in certain situations and these are what’s
called contextual tabs.
And we have a contextual tab here.
It’s this Format Tab.
And the Format Tab in this case is part of what’s called the Gantt Chart Tools.
And this is contextual in that because we have a Gantt Chart shown here, note the lying
its side label here, Gantt Chart.
We see the Gantt Chart Tools Format Tab which enables us to format a Gantt Chart to change
the styling, etcetera.
If I changed the view, so instead of showing the Gantt Chart I’m going to show, for example,
a Network Diagram.
I now have Network Diagram View and I get a contextual tab for that.
The Format Tab which is part of the Network Diagram Tools.
We’ll see some other contextual tabs as go through the course but let me for the moment
go back into Gantt Chart View.
One each of the tabs there are a number of controls.
And the controls can be all sorts of things.
They can be command buttons, they can be dropdown lists, they can be sets of radio buttons,
etcetera.
And they’re arranged into groups.
So for instance on the View Tab here the group on the left is the Task Views Group and there
are five controls here: Gantt Chart, Task Usage and these other three.
Each of these controls can be a single control or for instance as in here it can give access
to a whole menu of other options.
Now I should point out here something that I did point out earlier on and that is that
depending on the size of your screen, depending on the resolution of your screen, depending
on whether you’re in mouse mode or touch mode exactly what you see on each tab may
well vary.
You may see more or less controls in each of the groups than I do on this screen.
I’m recording this course on a PC with quite a high resolution.
If you have a smaller resolution PC, perhaps running it on a laptop with much less space
on the screen, you may well see less than me.
But you should pretty much see the same groups even if exactly what you can see in each group
is a little bit different from what I see.
So let’s now try to execute a command or two.
I’m going to go to the Task Tab.
And one thing you will notice is that some of the commands are grayed out.
So for instance, in the Clipboard Group on the Task Tab you have a Cuts command, a Copy
command and something called a Format Painter that are not grayed out.
So you could do those things at the moment.
Whereas you can’t use the Paste command.
It’s grayed out because we don’t have anything copied to the Clipboard.
And as with Windows applications in general, of course graying out indicates that a particular
command is not available.
Let me type a name of a task into this Task Name box for the first task in this little
project.
I could use the tick next to the Entry Bar or just press the Enter key.
And I now have Task 1.
If I select that particular task name by clicking on the box you can see that the box has a
border around it so it’s selected.
If I wanted to make that bold I could use the Bold command in the Font Group on the
Task Tab.
Text of that is now bold.
I could make it Italic and I could change the font from Calibri to say Blackoak Standard
and I could make it a larger font size, for example.
So that’s basically how you can use the commands on the Ribbon.
Now we’re not restricted to styling text.
If you take that particular task you could do all sorts of things to it.
For instance, you could record progress on that task using the commands on the Ribbon.
But more of that later.
Now slightly at the danger of getting ahead of ourselves here one thing you’ll notice,
particularly as your projects get bigger, is that the Ribbon does take up a lot of space.
And particularly if you’re using a small screen it takes up a disproportionately large
amount of space.
You can hide the Ribbon.
And there’s a little up arrow over here at the right hand end.
It says Collapse the Ribbon.
And if you click on Collapse the Ribbon the Ribbon is hidden.
Now you may say well that certainly gives me a bit more space but how do I use the commands?
The answer to that is that provided you’ve got a reasonable idea of where a command is.
So for instance, if I wanted to change the size of that Task 1 font back to 10 or 11
point, if I know the commands on the Task Tab all I have to do is go back to the Task
Tab, click on the name and the Ribbon reappears.
So if I then say okay it’s 18 and I want to put it back to 11.
And then if I want to execute another command, so for instance I want to change the font.
Once I finish, click back in my project again, then the Ribbon is hidden again.
Now when I describe that to you I said if I know where the particular command is on
the Task Tab in that case, if you don’t know where it is you can still click on any
one of the tabs and you can click around until you find the particular command that you want.
If you get to a point though at which you think well actually I need the Ribbon available
all the time again.
I don’t want it collapsed anymore.
If I just right click in there again, notice Collapse the Ribbon is ticked.
Just click to untick it and the Ribbon will be there all of the time now and you can see
all of the contents of the Ribbon all of the time.
One other thing I’d like to point out here is that you can customize the Ribbon.
And in particular you can create your own Ribbon tabs.
And you might be wondering about these two tabs here, Reporting and Team.
You may be looking at your installation of Project and thinking why haven’t I got those?
Well these are two custom tabs that I have made for specific purposes.
I’m not going to cover customization of the Ribbon here but I am going to briefly
look at customizing the Quick Access Toolbar a little bit later on in this section and
that should give you a pretty clear idea of how to set about customizing the Ribbon.
Let’s now turn our attention to the Quick Access Toolbar that we looked at earlier on
in the course.
And as you can see mine has about five or six commands currently shown.
One of them we talked about was the Touch/Mouse Mode command.
And then we have Undo and Redo and Save.
You may be a little bit mystified by these two symbols here.
These are two commands that I’ve put on the Quick Access Toolbar.
They’re actually custom commands.
I’ll come back to those in just a moment.
But as I explained earlier on if you want to change what’s shown on the Quick Access
Toolbar there is a standard pool of commands.
So if I wanted the Quick Print command shown I’d select it from the menu here, click
it, and Quick Print is now shown.
Now apart from switching on and off those standard commands you can customize the Quick
Access Toolbar.
And if I click on More Commands here it takes me into a page of the Project Options.
Now Project Options we’re going to look at in two or three sections from now but what
we have open here is the Quick Access Toolbar page which we can use to customize the Quick
Access Toolbar.
And let’s suppose that I want to add a button to the toolbar which will enable me with one
click to make something bold.
What I need to do is to find the Bold command in the list on the left and then add it to
the toolbar.
Now the list on the left is controlled by this dropdown.
And first of all we have the Popular Commands and they’re in alphabetical order.
I can’t see Bold there.
So if instead of Popular Commands I say All Commands I have access to the literally hundreds
of commands that are available in Microsoft Project.
And I want to find Bold.
There it is.
So I select Bold.
I click on the Add button between the two lists and it’s now added to my Quick Access
Toolbar.
If I want to put it in a different position I can select it and use the up and down arrows
here to change its position in the list.
And those two custom commands I’m going to remove both of those.
I don’t need those at the moment so I’m going to remove them.
And that’s it.
Click on OK and my Quick Access Toolbar will be customized.
If at some stage you make a mistake and you want to go back to the default, the settings
as they were originally, there’s a Reset button there.
So click on OK and there is my Bold command on the Quick Access Toolbar.
And with the cell, with the task name Task 1 selected I can switch Bold on and off using
that command.
It may well be that after you have been using Project 2016 for a while you will find it
very useful to customize the Quick Access Toolbar.
Also some people customize it to do particular jobs.
So for example, if a project manager is doing a weekly update of status he may put various
commands associated with task status on the Quick Access Toolbar or indeed create a custom
tab for the Ribbon for that purpose.
One other thing about the Quick Access Toolbar that some people fine useful.
It’s right up in the top left hand corner there and you have to sort of go across the
Ribbon to get to it.
You can actually position it below the Ribbon.
It’s very simple.
Just click on the dropdown there.
Show below the Ribbon and it appears down here.
It’s quite a bit easier to get to when you’re doing perhaps a long or repetitive task within
the body of a project.
And then of course you do pretty much the opposite to put it back again.
Now there’s one other type of toolbar that I want to point out to you now.
And it’s one that pops up all over the place.
We’re going to be using this type of toolbar in many places in the course.
If you take Task 1 here, select it here.
If I right click within that cell I get what’s called a Contextual Menu.
And it’s contextual in that the commands that are available there although they’re
all also available from various places on the Ribbon, these are deemed to be the ones
that you are most likely to want to use in the situation that you’re in.
And above that contextual menu there is a mini toolbar.
And again this deemed to be contextual, to contain the commands that are appropriate
to where you are in Project and what you’re doing.
So these work pretty much on the principle I’m sure you’d expect them to.
You click on things and they either execute commands or bring up other menus or bring
up dialogues or whatever.
So we have these contextual menus like this one and then we have mini toolbars like this
one.
And as I say, we’ll be using these at various points during the course.
That’s the end of this section.
I’ll see you in the next one.