Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at
mini toolbars. These can be used both in mouse mode and in touch mode, and they give us a
very quick way of accessing important commands. Now in order to demonstrate mini toolbars,
what I’ve done here is to just type some text into the table part of a Gantt Chart.
This is a new project and I’ve just put in a task name of Task 1. Now how and why
I did that isn’t really important. All I want you to see is that we’ve now got an
entry in the task name. If I now right click with the mouse in that particular cell in
the table, what I see is a little menu flying out and above that menu there is a little
toolbar and that’s what we refer to as the Mini Toolbar.
Now what you actually see in that mini toolbar depends on the circumstances, depends on what
you’re looking at, what you’re doing, and so on. But normally what it will contain
is the commands that you’re most likely to need depending on what you’re doing at
that exact point in time. Now in this case, I’ve typed in the name of a task. I’ve
just called it Task 1. And amongst the things that you can see on the mini toolbar is a
command to let me change the font. The font there at the moment is Calibri. If I wanted
to change it to a different font, there’s a drop down there that I could use to change
the font. So let me just use the mini toolbar to change the font. So I could go say from
Calibri to Broadway, and then there’s a command to change the font size. And then
other commands including commands to do things like make the text bold, italic, to color
it, or using this little drop down here with the bar on it to indicate how complete that
particular task is. So there’s quite a range of things that I can do using that mini toolbar.
Now having made that change to the font, let me just point out one of the commands on the
Quick Access Toolbar that we looked at earlier on. So click back up there, undo, and I’m
back to the original font again. Now let’s try the equivalent using touch.
We’ve already used tap in touch which is the equivalent to click with the mouse. And
obviously when you’re using an Office program like Project, you’re going to do an awful
lot of clicking, so a lot of tapping. You also tend to use right click quite a bit and
right click is how we brought up the mini toolbar and that little menu just now. Pretty
much the same with touch except that with touch the equivalent is tap and hold. So what
I’m going to do is tap and hold on Task 1 and that will bring up the touch version
of the Mini Toolbar. So tap and hold. Notice how the cursor shape changes to a square,
release it, and up comes the mini toolbar for touch. Now the mini toolbars tend to be
about the same. They tend to have a lot of commands in common but there are usually some
differences between the ones you get with mouse and the ones you get with touch. You
can see there that the core of the toolbars are the same but also with this touch one,
you’ve got these Paste, Cut, and Copy commands on it as well. And there will usually be some
differences and that’s a fairly typical type of difference.
Now while we’re looking at that mini toolbar and note how much bigger it is than the other
one, the usual reason so that you can operate it with your fingers. But at the right hand
end, there’s a drop down and that’s what we’re going to talk about in the next section.
If you click on the drop down, that gives you access to the equivalent right click menu.
So that’s it. That’s how you access the mini toolbars. Many people prefer using those
to using the Ribbon a lot and particularly if you collapse the Ribbon, you may find the
mini toolbar mean that you rarely need to go near the Ribbon, but that will depend on
what you do and your own preference in terms of operating Project 2013.
Okay, in the next section we’re going to have a very quick look at those right click
menus. What we call those are contextual menus. So please join me for that.