Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at
the Ribbon. So we’re going to start with Blank Project and the Ribbon is this rectangular
area that you can see towards the top of the window. The Ribbon replaces the old menu system
and in most of the components of Office. The replacement started in Office 2007 and although
they’ve progressed at different paces within the different components in Office 2013, the
Ribbon is pretty much universally now at the same stage of development. So if you’ve
used the Ribbon in something like Word or Excel, then in Project there won’t be any
great surprises. The Ribbon actually is a rectangle with a number of symbols on it and
the symbols represent different kinds of commands, options, buttons, settings, and so on. And
in the case of Project, we’re going to be looking at an awful lot of those during this
course. Now you can see one set of these buttons here
and the buttons on the Ribbon are divided into groups, and in turn each of the sets
of groups occupy one tab. Now the tabs are along the top here. There’s a Task tab,
a Resource tab, a Report tab, Project tab and View tab, and they are pretty much always
there when you’re using Project 2013. Currently, I have the Task tab selected. You can see
that sort of rectangle around it that tells me it’s selected. And on the Task tab, you
have groups. There’s a View Group, a Clipboard Group, a Font Group, a Schedule Group, and
so on. And each group has a number of buttons, a number of commands in it. The View Group
here has just one that’s called Gantt Chart. The Clipboard has four; the Font has about
seven or eight. Now depending on the resolution of your screen, you may see more or less commands
in these groups. You may indeed see more or less groups because what Project 2013 does
is to fit as much in as it can and it will vary to some extent depending on the size
of your screen, the resolution, etc. and one or two other things that we’re going to
look at in just a moment. So that’s the Task tab. Let’s look at the Resource tab.
Click on Resource. You can see the Resource tab that has its own set of groups: View,
Assignments, Insert, Properties, Level. Report tab, Project tab, View tab, we’ll be looking
at all of these during the course. Now in addition, at the moment there is another
tab, a Format tab. And you notice it’s got this sort of light lilac-y colored background,
Gantt Chart Tools. Some of the tabs on the Ribbon only appear in certain circumstances
and they’re called contextual tabs. Now at the moment, we’re looking at a Gantt
Chart. Now it’s actually not much of a Gantt Chart because it hasn’t got anything in
it at the moment, but you can tell it’s supposed to be a Gantt Chart because it says
Gantt Chart down at the side here. And when we’re showing a Gantt Chart, we will get
the Gantt Chart Tools Format tab which again has got a different set of commands on it
arranged into groups. Now let me just go back to the Task tab at
the moment. On the left here where it says View and it says Gantt Chart, let me just
click on there and I’m going to choose a different view. I’m going to choose a view
called Network Diagram. Now what happens with the network diagram selected is that I get
a different view. The view won’t tell me much at the moment because as I say I’ve
got no tasks. But with the network diagram, I get Network Diagram Tools Format tab that
has a different set of groups and commands on it. So we have these contextual tabs and
which contextual tabs you can see at any time depend on what you’re actually looking at,
and to some extent on what you’re doing at the time. Now the contextual tabs we’ll
look at as we go through the course and as I introduce different views, different types
of objects and so on, I will introduce many of these contextual tabs.
Now we’re back at the Task tab here and the next thing I want to point out to you
is that depending on what you’re looking at and what you’re doing, some of the commands
on the Ribbon may be enabled and some may not. So if you look at the Task tab at the
moment, you notice there that we’ve got a row of buttons there with percentages written
on them that are actually enabled. If you clicked on those, they would do something.
The button right on the left, this one that says Gantt Chart, the one we used just now
to switch to a different view, Network Diagram View and back here to Gantt Chart View, that’s
enabled. We can use that. But the Paste button is not enabled. It’s grayed out. You can
click on it, it won’t do anything. At any one time, you would expect that some buttons
are enabled and some are disabled, and as is the convention in a Windows interface commands
that are disabled are grayed out. So be aware of the fact that the buttons that are not
grayed out you can use at any time and the ones that are grayed out you can’t.
Now if you’re using touch, then you would switch between these tabs by tapping on the
names of the tabs: Task, Resource, Report, Project, etc. And then to execute a command,
you tap on the command, maybe choose from options if there are options, but there’s
a very important aspect of using touch with a Ribbon and it’s universal across the components
of Office 2013 and that is that there are two modes of operation. There is mouse mode
which is what I’m using at the moment and there is touch mode which I want to show you
next. Now to switch into touch mode for those of
you who are using touch, you’re going to use this little button here. The screen tip
that pops up, Touch, stroke, Mouse Mode. You can see it there. That is the tip that tells
you this button which is actually on the Quick Access Toolbar is the one you use to switch
between the two modes. Now if you click or tap on the little arrow there to the right
of the pointing finger, you get a choice: mouse, which is the current selection, or
touch. I’m going to tap on touch and I am now in touch mode. Now the important thing
to note here is that you have the same tabs and basically the same groups, although depending
on the tab, the situation and the screen resolution, etc., you may not be able to see all of the
groups at every time and the number of commands in some of the group may be reduced in touch
mode because basically what happens in touch mode is that everything is spaced out more
to enable you to operate it with your fingers. I pointed out to you just now that little
sequence of buttons with percentages marked on them. They would be incredibly difficult
to use with your fingers as they were just now, all sort of scrunched up tightly next
to each other. If you look at that same row of buttons here, you can see that in touch
mode they’re spaced out widely enough that you can use them with the tips of your fingers.
So if you’re working in touch mode, you can switch to touch mode and if you want to,
you can just stay there. I’m going to switch back to mouse mode now. I’m actually going
to switch back using my finger tips. But I’m going to switch back to mouse mode and from
now on, I’m going to use mouse mode in this section. But be aware of that setting for
touch. So tap on that button again, tap on mouse,
and I’m back into mouse mode again. One of the problems with using the Ribbon
is that it does use up rather a lot of space on the screen and sometimes when you’re
dealing with a large complex project, you may say I wish the Ribbon was a bit smaller
or I could just get it out of the way to give myself a bit more space to work with. Well,
there is a way of doing that. You may not want to use this approach early on in your
use of Project 2013 but when you’ve been using it for a while, this will very probably
be something that you like to do. If you look towards the right hand end of the Ribbon,
there’s a little up pointing arrow there and the screen tip that comes up is Collapse
the Ribbon. And if you want to collapse the Ribbon, basically you click that and the Ribbon
is now out of your way and you’ve got a lot more space to work in. Now you may see
that the most obvious disadvantage of doing that is you no longer have access to the commands
that you need to execute in order to work on your project. But the assumption here is
that you know pretty much where all the commands are at this point and all you really need
to be able to see are the tabs. And if I say wanted to switch from say Gantt Chart View
into Network Diagram View, I know that’s on the Task tab; it’s the left hand command.
All you then have to do is to click on Task, go to that command as we did just now, click
there, change to Network Diagram View, select Network Diagram, Project 2013 switches into
Network Diagram View and minimizes the Ribbon again. So not only does it execute the command,
but it also puts the Ribbon out of the way again as well. Now when you’re confident
enough in your use of Project 2013, you may want to choose that approach to give yourself
some more space to work in. Now if you take that approach to collapsing
the Ribbon, there may, of course, come a point in time where you decide maybe you’re doing
something different you haven’t done before and you need to be able to see the Ribbon
all of the time so that you can find the right commands or indeed you’re using one of the
contextual tabs that you’re maybe not so familiar with, then if you right click, say,
on one of the tabs so you’re sure that you’re using the Ribbon. One of the options there
Collapse the Ribbon, the bottom one, just uncheck that and the Ribbon is expanded and
you can see it all of the time again. Now there’s just one other thing I’d like
to look at in relation to the Ribbon here. If you right click somewhere on the Ribbon,
you see a number of options here and one of them, Customize the Ribbon, second from the
bottom. Click on Customize the Ribbon. That actually takes you into the Project Options
that we’re going to look at later on in the course in detail. But one of the pages
on the Project Options is Customize Ribbon. Now this is outside the scope of this course.
I’m not going to go into this at all in detail now but it may be something you want
to find out for later on and that is that you can customize the Ribbon. You can add
your own tab. You can create a Ribbon tab of your own. You can create your own groups
to put on it and you can choose from the available commands in Project 2013 to make up that group
or those groups on your own tab. There is a limit to what you can do to rearrange the
standard tabs and groups but you can certainly create your own. I pointed out the main tabs
here: Task, Resource, Report, Project, View. There are some other standard tabs: Add-ins,
Developer, Compare Projects. And apart from the main tabs there are tool tabs, a couple
of which we’ve already seen, but actually they’re quite a lot of tool tabs in Project
2013 and we’ll see a few of those as we go as well. So as I say this is outside the
scope of this course but if you find you are doing a job where it would be really helpful
to, say, have a particular set of commands all in one place to save switching around
on the Ribbon all the time, then I suggest you look into customizing the Ribbon.
So that’s it for the Ribbon. In the next section, we’re going to look at the Quick Access Toolbar. I’ll see you then.