Welcome back to our course on Access 2016.
In this section we’re going to look in some detail at the Ribbon in Access 2016.
If you’re familiar with the use of the Ribbon from a recent version of Access or perhaps
from another component of Office 2016 you can probably skip this section.
The Ribbon in Office programs was introduced starting in Office 2007 but mostly in Office
2010 to replace the old conventional menu system.
And the idea of the Ribbon is to make it easier to locate and use commands and settings and
controls that you might need in a desktop program.
The Ribbon in Access 2016 works pretty much the same way as the Ribbon does in other components
of Office 2016.
The Ribbon is that big bar up there.
And what we normally say is that it’s divided into tabs.
The tab that’s currently shown is the Home tab here.
And it’s easy to select one of the other tabs.
All you need to do is to click on it.
So that’s the Create tab, that’s the External Data tab, and so on.
On the left where it says File, by now you know that’s how you get into Backstage View.
That is not one of the Ribbon tabs.
And on the right Tell Me you’ve already seen that that’s not a Ribbon tab either.
The four tabs that you can see are pretty much by default always shown.
But there are many other tabs and I’m going to point out some of them to you later on
in this section.
Now apart from switching between the tabs in that way by clicking if you actually put
the mouse over the Ribbon and you’ve got a scroll wheel on your mouse then you can
actually scroll through the tabs with the scroll wheel.
Let’s go back to the Home tab.
On a tab there are a number of groups.
The groups are divided by vertical lines.
So in the case of the Home tab you’ve got a Views group, a Clipboard group, a Sort and
Filter group, and so on.
And each of those is separated from the next by that very thin vertical line.
Within a group there are a number of controls.
So for example, if you look at the Clipboard group on the Home tab there are four controls
shown, Paste, Cut, Copy, and Format Painter.
Now I should point out that it will quite often be the case if you’re using a screen
which is very different from mine in either size or resolution or aspect ratio you won’t
always necessarily see the same commands in a group arranged in the same way that I do.
You’ll always be able to access the commands that you need but they won’t necessarily
be arranged in exactly the same way as they are on my device.
Now continuing to look at that Clipboard group what you may notice is that Copy is in black
and the other three are grayed out.
And at any one time if a command is usable you’ll see the text there in black, as in
this case Copy.
So I could copy what’s selected.
But Paste is disabled because I haven’t got anything copied to the Clipboard.
If I did copy something to the Clipboard, so if I clicked on Copy now then Paste will
become enabled and I could paste what I’ve copied somewhere else.
Now in terms of what the various controls actually do it does vary quite a bit.
There are some controls that, for example, bring up another dialog.
So for instance if I go over to the right hand end of the Home tab here in the Text
Formatting group, the bottom right hand corner there is what’s called a little dialog box
launcher.
And if I click on that it launches a dialog box and I can use that dialog box to format
what’s on this Contact List datasheet.
And that’s something that we’ll be doing later on in the course.
Some of the other controls, for example, if I go to the Records group there is a Spelling
command button there.
If I click on Spelling it’ll do a spellcheck for me.
Other controls do things like enable me to set values, set margins, to copy and paste
as you’ve just seen, or to change some aspect of the current workspace view.
So the things that you can do using the controls on the Ribbon vary very considerably and of
course depend on what you’re doing at any particular time.
Now I mentioned just now that there are more than just these four tabs.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to go into Design View for the Contact Details Form.
So I’m going to right click and go into Design View.
And I could now, if I wanted to, work on the design of that particular form.
Again we’ll be doing form design activities later on in the course.
But when I go into design of a form I get the Form Design Tools.
And the Form Design Tools take the form of three additional tabs.
You can see them up here.
Form Design Tools.
There’s a Design tab, an Arrange tab and a Format tab.
And each of those has its own groups and controls.
And many of the activities that you perform in Access 2016 have associated tools and those
tools normally include one or more what are called contextual tabs.
Now notice at the moment that I have the Contact List Form open and I have the Contact Details
Form open in Design View.
Currently Contact Details is selected.
If I click on Contact List of course those contextual tabs disappear because they’re
not relevant to the Contact List which is only open to view data and not to design the
Contact List Form itself.
Not everybody was happy when the Ribbon came out and one of the objections that people
had and to some extent still have is that it takes up a lot of space on the screen.
Once you’re used to where things are on the Ribbon generally what you can do is to
collapse the Ribbon.
And if you look over towards the right-hand end of the Ribbon there’s a little up arrow
here, Collapse the Ribbon.
And if I collapse the Ribbon I save almost all of the space that it uses.
Now you may say that there’s an obvious flaw in that arrangement because now you can’t
see all those commands and controls.
Well the point is that if I wanted to do something now that required me to use a control on the
Ribbon, provided I know which tab it’s on all I need to do is to go to that tab, say
the Home tab, and click on the command or control that I want to operate.
As soon as I’ve done it it disappears again.
So I get my space back.
Now again people say that’s fine if you know where everything is but what if you don’t?
Well if you don’t know and you need to hunt around again if I click on Home, I look for
what I want and I can’t find it, I click on Create.
I can click through the tabs until I find the one I want or maybe even use Tell Me.
And it isn’t until I’ve actually executed a command that it will go back to its collapsed
state again.
Now a lot of people, including me, tend to work a lot of the time with the Ribbon collapsed
to save space.
I won’t be doing that on this course because you need to see where all the commands are.
But if you have been using it in a collapsed state and then you want to restore it to its
normal state there’s another little button over here, Pin the Ribbon, which will pin
the Ribbon open again.
I’ve got one more thing to tell you about in relation to the Ribbon at the moment and
that is that if you right click on the Ribbon one of the options is Customize the Ribbon.
That takes you to Access Options and a particular page, Customize Ribbon.
On this course I’m not actually going to cover customizing the Ribbon but I am going
to briefly talk to you about it now.
It may well be that if you do a couple of repetitive tasks or perhaps the way that you
work means that you tend to use certain controls or groups of controls a lot and you’re constantly
switching between Ribbon tabs to access them what you can do is to rearrange the Ribbon.
There are quite a few restrictions on what you can do to standard groups and standard
controls and so on.
So you can’t just rearrange anything anyhow that you want.
What people generally do if they want to have if you like a rearranged Ribbon is to create
their own tab, put their own groups on it and their own controls in the group.
And there are facilities on this Customize Ribbon page of Access Options to create a
new tab, create a new group and then you can put the controls you need into the groups
that you want on the tab.
Now I’m going to show you in the next section how to customize the Quick Access Toolbar.
And when you’ve seen that you’ll have all the basic skills that you’d need to
customize the Ribbon, to create your own Ribbon tab.
But I’m going to leave that for you to do yourself.
You can certainly look it up on Office.com or via the Help how to customize the Ribbon.
It’s not a particularly difficult thing to do but it’s not something that I’m
going to do on this course.
So that’s the Access 2016 Ribbon.
I’ll see you in the next section.