Access 2013 Ribbon Interface: Optimized for Work on the Go with Touch

Access 2013 sees the continued refinement of Microsoft’s Ribbon interface. The addition of a touch mode with improved context features makes it easier than ever to take your work where you need to go using tablets and other touch-capable devices. When activated, buttons and menus are spaced more generously, allowing easy selection of options by fingertip. Mini toolbars are a new feature of the touch interface mode which replace the right-click menu, but provide comfortable fingertip access to the same functionality. Touch mode can be activated by clicking the pointing finger icon at the top left of the screen.

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Video transcripts:

Hello again and welcome back to our course on Access 2013. In this section we’re going to look at the Ribbon which you may or may not be familiar with. It’s been around for a few years now, but it’s a common feature across the components of Office 2013.

But in fact the first thing I’m going to do is to point at something on the Quick Access Toolbar because before we look at the Ribbon in detail I’d like to do something which may help those of you who are using touch screen devices. One of the options on the Quick Access Toolbar is a button there which has got a picture of a pointing finger and a drop down arrow on its right. If I click on that it says, Optimize spacing between commands. And basically when you’re working in Access 2013 there are two modes. There is mouse mode that presents standard Ribbon and commands and in this mode the interface is optimized for use with the mouse. And there is touch mode where there is more space between the commands and this is optimized for use with touch. Now the basic principle of the Ribbon is the same in both modes. But if I switch to touch mode you should be able to see the difference. In touch mode everything on the Ribbon is spaced out more. In fact the buttons that are shown there are actually slightly fewer buttons shown overall. The ones that are shown work the same and all of the other commands and functions are available. But the general idea as I mentioned right near the beginning of the course is to be able to operate the buttons on the Ribbon with the tips of your fingers and that’s why they’re spaced out more in this mode. Now for the rest of this section and really I suppose for the rest of the course if you’re in touch mode, if you’ll be using a touch screen device, you probably want to switch on touch mode now and keep it switched on. If you’re using a mouse but you actually like touch mode, you like things spaced out like this, then there’s absolutely no reason that you shouldn’t use the Ribbon like this except that having the Ribbon bigger and spaced out means that there is less room for everything else I’m afraid. Having said all of that I’m going to go back into mouse mode for this section, but those of you who want to stay in touch mode hopefully everything will still make sense and everything will still work in touch mode as well. So let go back into mouse mode.

So now let’s look at the Ribbon in detail. I all ready mentioned that we have the tabs of the Ribbon and on each of the tabs you see different items on the Ribbon itself. Now if I start with the Home Tab the buttons on it are arranged into groups. There’s a Views Group, a Clipboard Group, and Sort and Filter Group, Records, and so on. Within a group we have a selection of buttons. Now the buttons don’t all work in the same way and they certainly don’t all do the same thing. Some of them are simple buttons you click on like that one, Save which saves the current record in the Records Group. Others are toggle buttons which switch something on or off. Others like the View button over here on the left are in two parts. The top part does something and the lower part with the arrow if you click on it, the arrow opens up to offer you a selection. Still further ones have drop downs. Some of them you can type numbers or words into. There’s a whole variety of different forms. Now we generally refer to them either as the commands or the buttons. So I might say the View command or the Save button or something like that. So we have Ribbon, tabs, groups, and then buttons or commands within a group.

Now generally speaking in Access 2013 you will see the four tabs that you can see here, but there are other tabs as well and these are sometimes referred to contextual tabs. They’re ones that only appear in context. Let me show you an example. Earlier on in the course we looked at the Contact details form. We opened it in Design View. Contact details Design View. You’ll see it open up here. And you get three additional tabs and the tabs collectively are referred to as the Form Design Tools. This is a form and we’re in design mode. We’re in a situation here where we can change the layout of a form that users are going to fill in. Within the Form Design Tools there are three more tabs. There’s a Design Tab, an Arrange Tab, and a Format Tab. And each of those has its own groups and its own buttons. So for example on the Arrange Tab in the Row and Columns Group there is an Insert above command. Now which contextual tabs you see will depend on what sort of object you’re working on and in many cases what you’re doing to it. So let me close down Contact details again.

Now when the Ribbon was introduced back in Office 2007 and then as it subsequently been introduced into all of the components of Office over a period of time a lot of people didn’t like and still don’t like the Ribbon. One of the objections to the Ribbon is that it does take up a lot of space on the screen compared to the old menu system. Now to some extent you can compensate for this and you will have a good chance of being able to use this approach when you’ve been using Access for a little while. And what you can do is to minimize the Ribbon. Now on the right hand end of the Ribbon there’s a little up pointing arrow there and if I click on that what it does is to minimize the Ribbon. So let me click and you can no longer see the Ribbon. You can see the tabs but not the Ribbon. Now you may say, Well that’s all well and good but now I can’t see the commands. How do I execute the commands? Well if you know on which tab a particular command is you can just click on that tab. So if you know the command you need is on the Home Tab click on Home and that tab appears, there’s the commands. You can go to the one or ones that you need and execute. If you don’t know which tab it’s on then you can click on anyone of the tabs and just tab through them until you find the one you want, the command you want, and then when you found the one that you want, let’s suppose you wanted to do a copy. As soon as you click Copy it does the copy and the Ribbon is minimized again and you’re back to where you were. Now many people work with the Ribbon in this way. They keep it minimized and then all they do when they need a command is just click on the tab and if they’re not quite sure where it is they click through the tabs until they find it. If you want to un-minimize the Ribbon, if you want to restore it to normal all you need to do is to right click on one of the tab names. Let me right click on Database Tools and then the one there that says Collapse the Ribbon, if I just click on that to un-collapse it I’m back into using the Ribbon in its normal mode.

Now at the moment I’ve got selected on the left here the form Contact details. The form isn’t actually open. The form that’s over here is Contact list. We did open it just now in Design View. When I’ve got a particular object selected or even if I don’t have an object selected in Access 2013 some of the commands on the Ribbon will be enabled, they’re the ones that you can see generally in black or dark color, depending on the command. The ones that are grayed out are the commands that I can’t execute at the moment. So what I can do and what I cannot do is contextual in Access. I can copy at the moment because I’ve got something selected. Contact details is selected so I can do a copy. In fact I just did one. But I haven’t got anything on the Clipboard. So the Paste button is disabled. It’s grayed out.
Now we’ve talked so far in this section about using the commands on the Ribbon but you normally also have a right click menu, a contextual menu. So if I right click on Contact details I get a selection of commands on that contextual menu. I don’t get all of the commands that are available on the Ribbon but I get the ones that Access 2013 considers to be the most likely to be the ones that I would want to execute at that time. So in the case of Contact details here Copy is one of the available options and Delete is another one if I wanted to delete that form. Go into Design View is another one. Now generally speaking with any object in Access 2013 apart from executing commands from the Ribbon you can also use the right click, the contextual menu, and during the course I’m going to pretty much alternate between those approaches and you may prefer one to the other but it’s always useful to know you’ve got a shortcut menu there available as well.

Now I’m going to show you one other thing about the Ribbon before we move on. This is actually outside the scope of the course. I just want you to be aware of something. If I right click again on the Database Tools Tab one of the options is Customize the Ribbon and if I click on Customize the Ribbon it takes me into Access Options. Here we are back at Access Options but with the Customize Ribbon page selected. And if you look down the right you will see a list of what are called the main tabs in Access 2013. So you’ve got the Home Tab there, the one that’s highlighted at the moment. It has its groups listed: Views, Clipboard, Sort and Filter, Records. If I click on the plus sign next to one of the group names I get a list of all the commands that are in that group. Now this page of the Access Options Dialogue is the one where it’s possible to customize the Ribbon. You can to some extent move around what’s there already, although there are quite a lot of restrictions. But normally the best way to customize the Ribbon is to add your own tab so you’ve got a new tab button, put your own groups on it, and then put whatever commands you want into those groups. So if for example you were doing a job where it was very repetitive and you had a couple of commands on one tab and a couple of commands on another and a couple of commands on another and you were always going backwards and forwards between them you could make your own tab. You could put your own group or groups on it and then put those commands together into your group or groups to make it as convenient for you to use as possible. Customizing the Ribbon is outside the scope of this course but you may find that useful, particularly if you are doing some kind of repetitive work in Access. You may also find it’s useful in terms of actually operating an Access database in putting commands together.

So that’s it on the Ribbon. In the next section we’re going to look at the Quick Access Toolbar.

Simon C

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!