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.