Microsoft Project 2019 – Ribbon and the Toolbars

In this section, we’re going to look at the Ribbon and Toolbars. Probably you can’t skip this section when you’ve used other Microsoft software that uses the Ribbon and Toolbars.

Let’s talk about one or two things that are quite specific to Microsoft Project. You’ll be able to pick these up easily if you’re an experienced user of the Ribbon.

Let me just explain for those of you who aren’t so familiar with the Ribbon. The Ribbon system was introduced about ten years ago. After that, it’s fairly consistent and has been implemented across all of the Microsoft applications.

As I pointed out already. The rectangle with a number of tabs. Select a tab. The moment I have the Report tab selected; you select a tab by clicking on the name.

So this is the Task tab. We have the Resource tab, Report tab, Project tab, so on and so forth. And you’ll see these tabs whenever you’re using Project. Now, this can be changed by local settings but talking in general terms here.

However, there are some tabs that only appear in certain situations and these are what we call Contextual tabs. We have a Contextual tab here at the moment and it’s the Format tab.

The Gantt Chart Tools is part of the Format tab. This is contextual because we have a Gantt Chart shown here.

This area on the right, remember, we have a Gantt Chart tools tab. This enables us to do things like changing the format of the Gantt Chart and other tasks.

Let’s go for Network Diagram. If I change the View instead of showing the Gantt Chart, for example. I get a contextual tab for that and The Network Diagram View.

And you can see there, we have again a Format tab. That is part of the network diagram tools. We’ll see some other contextual tabs as we go through the course. Let me for the moment go back into Gantt Chart View. 

On each of the tabs, there are a number of controls and the controls can be all sorts of things. They can be command buttons, they can be dropdown lists, they can be sets of radio buttons, etcetera.

They’re arranged into groups. For instance, on the View tab here: the group on the left is the Task Views group. There are five controls here: Gantt Chart, Task Usage, and these other three.

Each of these controls can be a single control. For instance, as in here, it can give us access to a whole menu of items.

Now I should point out something here. I did point out earlier on that it is depending on the size of your screen or resolution of your screen. Also depending on whether you’re in mouse mode or touch mode. It determines exactly what you’ll see on each tab.

It may vary depending on what settings you have implemented. You may see more or fewer controls in each group than I do on my screen. I’m recording this course on a PC with quite a high resolution.

You may well see less than me if you have a smaller resolution PC. Or perhaps running it on a laptop with much less space on the screen. You should pretty much see the same groups. Even if exactly what you can see in each group is a little bit different from what I see. 

So let’s now try to execute a command or two. I’m going to go to the Task tab. You’ll notice is that some of the commands are greyed out.

For instance, in the Clipboard group on the Task tab. You have a Cut command, a Copy command, and something called a Format Painter that is not grayed out.

You could do all of those things at this moment. Whereas you can’t use the Paste command. It’s grayed out because we don’t have anything copied to the clipboard.

As with Windows applications in general. Graying out indicates that a particular command is not available at the current time.  Let me type the name of a task into this task name box.

I could use the tick next to the task entry bar or I could just press the Enter key. So I’m going to use the tick like so.

I select that particular task name as I have here. You can see that the box has a border around it. So I know that it’s selected. If I wanted to make that bold, I could use the Bold command in the Font group in the Task tab.

I could make it italic and I could change the font from Calibri to say Bedoni MT Black. I can also toggle these options off. If I click Italic again it will take me back to just bold.

I could also make this font a larger size if I wanted to by clicking the Font Size dropdown. Selecting a larger size. So that’s basically how you can use the commands on the Ribbon.

We’re not just restricted to styling text. If you take that particular task you could do all sorts of things to it. For instance, you could record progress on that task using the commands on the Ribbon. But more of that later. 

Now slightly at the danger of getting ahead of ourselves here. One thing you’ll notice particularly as your project gets bigger. The Ribbon does take up quite a lot of space.

And in particular, if you’re using a small screen it takes up a disproportionately large amount of space. Now you can hide the Ribbon and there’s a little arrow up here over on the right-hand end.

If you hover over it it says Collapse the Ribbon. You can see the keyboard shortcut for that is Control-F1. If we click Collapse: the Ribbon will be hidden.

You may well say that certainly gives me a little bit more space. But how do I use the commands?

The answer to that is that provided you’ve got a reasonable idea of where the command is.

For instance, if I wanted to change the size of that Task 1 font back to 10, or 11 points: if I know the commands on the Task tab all I have to do is go back to the Task tab. Click on the name and the Ribbon reappears.

So I say okay then it’s currently 18 and I want to put it back to 11 I can very easily do that. Once I finish making my changes is I click back on the project you will see that the Ribbon is hidden again.

Now when I described that to you I said that if you know where a particular command is on the Task tab, if you don’t know where it is you can still click on any one of the tabs and you can pretty much click around to find the task that you want.

Click off again on the main project window and you’ll see that those Ribbons disappear again. If you get to a point through which you think, “Well actually I need the Ribbon available all the time again. I don’t just want it collapsed anymore.”

If I just click on a tab to bring the Ribbon back and right click my mouse over on the right-hand side but still in that Ribbon area you will notice that Collapse the Ribbon is currently ticked. So just click to untick and the Ribbon will be there all of the time and now you can see the contents of each of the Ribbons. 

One thing I’d like to point out here is that you can customize the Ribbon and in particular you can create your own Ribbon tabs. Now I’m not going to cover customization of the Ribbon here but I am going to briefly look at customizing the Quick Access Toolbar a little bit later on in this section and that should give you a pretty clear idea of how to set about customizing the Ribbon.  

So now let’s turn our attention to that Quick Access Toolbar that we looked earlier on in the course. And as you can see here mine has about four commands already shown.

One of them that we talked about was the Touch/Mouse Mode command, then we have Undo and Redo and also Save. But as I explained earlier on if you want to change what’s shown on the Quick Access Toolbar there is a standard pool of commands.

So I wanted the Quick Print command shown I’d select Quick Print from the menu here. So if I click it you’ll see that the Quick Print button now shows in my Quick Access Toolbar.  

Now, apart from switching on and off those standard commands, you can customize the Quick Access Toolbar further. And if I click on More Commands it takes me to a page of the Project Options.

Now Project Options we’re going to look at in two or three sections from now but what we have open here is the Quick Access Toolbar page which we can use to customize that Quick Access Toolbar.

And let’s suppose that I want to add a button to the toolbar which will enable me with one click to make something bold. What I need to do is to find the Bold command in the list on the left and then add it to the toolbar. The list on the left is controlled by this dropdown menu. And first of all, we have the popular commands.

They’re in alphabetical order. Now I can’t see Bold there. So instead of popular commands, I say All commands. Again, these are listed in alphabetical order.

Now, I have access to the literally hundreds of commands that are available in Microsoft Project and I want to find Bold. So let’s scroll down and go to the B section and there it is.

So now, I’m going to click the Add button and what that will do is move the Bold command from the list on the left-hand side across to the list on the right-hand side. And what this list on the right-hand side shows are all of the commands that are currently on my Quick Access Toolbar.

If I want to put it in a different position I can select it and use the up and down arrows at the side here to reorder my commands. So I’m happy with it just there. If I click on the OK button, you’ll see that my Bold command has now been added to my Quick Access Toolbar. 

Now let’s just jump back into those project options again because there’s one other important point to mention here. If at some stage you make a mistake and you want to go back to the default or the settings that were originally used there is a Reset button at the bottom there.

I’m actually happy with how I have it so I’m going to click on OK again and now I have my Bold button which I can use and I can choose to toggle that off and on. 

It may well be that after you’ve been using Project 2019 for a while you’ll find it very useful to customize that Quick Access Toolbar. Also, some people customize it to do a particular job.

So for example, if a project manager is doing a weekly update of status he may put various commands associated with task status on the Quick Access Toolbar or indeed create a custom tab for the Ribbon for that particular purpose.

One other thing about the Quick Access Toolbar that some people find useful. It’s right up in the top left-hand corner there and you have to sort of go across the Ribbon to get to it.

You can actually position it below the Ribbon. It’s very simple. Just click the dropdown and you have the option Show Below the Ribbon. Then, you can see it’s moved down to underneath the Ribbon.

And that makes it quite a bit easier to get to when you’re doing perhaps along or repetitive task within the body of a project. And of course, if you wanted to put it back up to the very top left-hand corner you could essentially do the opposite by clicking the dropdown and selecting Show Above the Ribbon. 

Now there’s one other type of toolbar that I want to point out to you now and it’s one that pops up all over the place. We’re going to be using this type of toolbar in many places in this course.

If you take Task 1 here for example and select it if I right-click I get what’s called a Contextual Menu. And it’s contextual in that the commands that are available there. Although they’re also available from various places on the Ribbon, these are deemed to be the ones that you’re most likely to want to use in the situation that you’re in.

Above the contextual menu, there is a mini toolbar. Again, this is deemed to be contextual to contain the commands that are appropriate to where you are in Project and what you’re doing.

So these work pretty much on the principle that I’m sure you’d expect them to. You click on things and they either execute commands or bring up other menus or bring up dialogues. So we have these contextual menus like this one and then we have the mini toolbar as well. And as I say, we’ll be using these at various points during the course.

And that’s the end of this section. I will see you in the next one. 

Deborah Ashby

Deborah Ashby is a TAP Accredited IT Trainer, specializing in the design, delivery, and facilitation of Microsoft courses both online and in the classroom.She has over 11 years of IT Training Experience and 24 years in the IT Industry. To date, she's trained over 10,000 people in the UK and overseas at companies such as HMRC, the Metropolitan Police, Parliament, SKY, Microsoft, Kew Gardens, Norton Rose Fulbright LLP.She's a qualified MOS Master for 2010, 2013, and 2016 editions of Microsoft Office and is COLF and TAP Accredited and a member of The British Learning Institute.