The Ribbon Is Large and in Charge in Excel 2013

The Excel menu has been slowly transitioning over the years from the grid with drop-down menus towards the “ribbon.” In the latest version of Excel, the ribbon transition is complete, and users are now left with this smoother, seamless menu option.

The ribbon is that rectangular bit at the top of Excel, with command options that are displayed all the time. At the top where the menu used to be are now tabs. These tabs allow selection of various menu tools.

With the ribbon in full effect, Excel is able to deploy even more access in a limited amount of space.

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Video transcripts:

Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013.  If you’ve used Office 2007 products or Office 2010 products, you’ll be familiar with the Ribbon and the Quick Access Toolbar.  For the different constituent programs within Office, the migration from the old Menu system to the Ribbon based system has preceded at a sort of variable pace.  Some of them have completed the transition before the others.  But by the time we get to 2013, it’s pretty much complete.  And in Windows 8, the Ribbon is starting to make an appearance.  If you’re using Windows 8, you will have seen the program that was called Windows Explorer that’s now called File Explorer has a Ribbon interface as well.  So, pretty much the Ribbon is here to stay.  Not everybody likes it.  Some people still prefer the old Menu system.  But I think more people like it now than did originally and one of the good things about the Ribbon Interface is it is pretty highly customizable and if you do particularly repetitive work or if you focus on just a few commands within a product like Excel, so you don’t need the vast array of different options that are available, then the ability to customize the Interface can really pay off.  So if you’ve not used the Ribbon before or you’re a little bit cagey about using it and you think, well, I’d really prefer the old Menu system.  Give the Ribbon a chance because I think that if you use it for a while it will grow on you.

The Ribbon is this sort of rectangle here and part of the Ribbon, or just above it if you like, you have these words like View, Review, Data, Formulas, and so on.  Now these correspond to tabs and at any one time with the Ribbon, you have a selected tab.  Now omit the word File from this, that file white on a green background.  That’s the access to Backstage View, which we’ve used already.  We’re talking about the word Home onwards and at the moment you see that Home has got this sort of three-quarters of a rectangle round it.  The Home tab is selected.  If I click on the word Insert, the Insert tab will be selected.  Page Layout and so on.  So they are the tabs of the Ribbon and at any time in Excel which tabs you can see will vary.  Now the tabs you see now will be there pretty much all of the time.  It’s more that you get additional tabs sometimes.  And you’ll see some of those later on in the course.

The Home tab, as the name implies, that’s the one which we sort of regard as Home.  And when the Home tab is selected you can see a number of groups.  Now the groups have names and the groups are the words at the bottom.  So that’s the Clipboard Group.  That’s the Font Group.  And a group, the groups are separated by these vertical faint dividing lines.  So there’s a Clipboard Group, then there’s a dividing line, then there’s the Font Group, then another line, Alignment Group, another one, Number, and so on.  So on each of the tabs there are a number of groups and as you will see each tab has different groups.

Now within a group there are individual commands.  So for instance, on the Insert tab, in the Tables Group, Pivot Table Command, a recommended Pivot Tables Command, and a Table Command.  Now note as I hover over those, I’m getting those screen tips that we talked about earlier.  They’ll tell you a little bit about what each of those commands does.  Many of the commands on many of the tabs we’re going to be covering on the course; so I’m not too worried at the moment about exactly a command does.  I just want to show you the principle that you’ve got tabs, within tabs you’ve got groups, within groups you’ve got commands.

Now the next thing I want to point out about the Ribbon is that the commands are in effect context sensitive.  And at the moment, you should be able to see that really all of the commands on this Ribbon, all of the commands in all of the groups on the Insert tab are grayed out.  You couldn’t actually execute any of them at the moment and the reason is that we don’t have a workbook open.  Let’s go to the Home tab.  On the Home tab, same thing, everything is grayed out.  So let’s open that first Sample Workbook, the one that we looked at earlier on. Once that’s open then virtually every command is now enabled.  One or two aren’t.  There’s one on the left, Paste, that’s grayed out.  You couldn’t paste something.  But virtually everything else is.  Go to the Insert tab, most of that.  You notice how the commands take on their color, they get bolder; they get sharper.  You can see them.  As you hover over them, they highlight, you get the screen tips.  You could use those commands once you’ve got a workbook open.  So the ability to use a command is largely dependent on whether that command can be used in a specific situation.  Now that doesn’t only depend on whether you have a workbook open.  It can depend on other things as well.  And we’ll come back to that aspect of using the Ribbon as well a little bit later on.

So, we have the Ribbon.  We have tabs on the Ribbon.  Within the tabs we have command groups and within the groups we have commands.  The commands themselves vary.  They all do different things, but they also have different natures.  Some of them, let’s take the Table Command here for example; if I click on Table what I get is a little dialog inviting me to create a table.  We’ll look at that later on, but that’s a pretty straightforward command.  If on the other hand I go to this one, Pivot Chart, which is in the Charts Group. There are two parts to this; there’s a top part and a bottom part.  And in fact they both have the same screen tip which is a bit confusing.  But one of the notable differences and you’ll see this quite a bit, is that the bottom one has a little arrow.  When you’ve got a little arrow, a little sort of chevron like that, that means there’s going to be a choice.  So if I click on that, click on the drop down I’m given a choice of a pivot chart or a pivot chart and pivot table.  I can choose either of those.  Let me just click away.  If I click on the top part which doesn’t have the arrow, I just get in this case a pivot chart.  So there’s no choice for me to make there; that just makes that thing happen straightaway.  That’s quite a common feature.  So let’s look at another example over here on the right text.  If I click on the drop down under Text, I have a number of options.  Some of them have gone off the edge of the screen actually, but you can see a number of different options that I can choose from.  Now different commands will have different numbers of options or none at all, and the way they work varies as well.

So here I am back on the Home tab.  One of the commands in the Font Group is the Font Size Command and it’s actually a drop down list.  If I click on the arrow next to 11 which is the current font size, the default in this case is Calibri 11 point.  I can choose from one of the available font sizes.  So if I wanted to change to 12 select 12; that is now the font size.  If I want to, I can also edit in situ.  I don’t have to choose one from the available sizes.  So if I wanted say 13 point, I could just type 13 even though it’s not on the available list.  Now in some cases, I wouldn’t be allowed to do that.  In this case, I am.  So you have a choice there between choosing from the drop down list or putting in a value of your own.

Now amongst the other options, amongst the other command types that you’ve got here, again we’ve got various drop downs and so on, but most of these groups and certainly most of the ones on the Home tab have a little symbol in the bottom right hand corner of the group.  You can probably just about see it there.  And that’s what’s called a Dialog Box Launcher.  And if we take Font, for example, the Font Group, if I click on the Dialog Box Launcher, it brings up a dialog.  Now the dialog is the Format Cells dialog that we’ll be looking at later on.  But within that dialog, there is a specific tab selected and that is the Font tab.  And basically with this we can go through and select Font, Style, Size, Color, whether we have Underline, various other options rather than using the individual commands in the Font Group on the Ribbon we can use the more conventional dialog approach.  And some people prefer to use the dialog than taking the individual commands one at a time in the Font Group.  So if you know exactly what you want to do but you’ve got to change four or five things to do it sometimes using the dialog will give you a quicker result.

Now one disadvantage of the Ribbon is that it does take up quite a bit of space on the screen.  But you can control this is a couple of ways.  When you’ve been using the Ribbon for a while, you’ll find that you tend to remember where the commands are and therefore if you wanted to do a particular thing on a spreadsheet, you may know that in order say to make a particular cell bold or to add up a column of figures, you need to go to a particular place on the Ribbon.  It may be then that you only need to be able to see the tab names to select the tab that you want.  Now if you look at the top right hand corner of the Excel workspace, you’ve got the Close, Maximize, Minimize buttons.  You’ve got the question mark symbol there to go to Help and in between there’s another symbol, Ribbon Display Options.  If you click on Ribbon Display Options, you have the three options for the Ribbon Display.  There’s Show tabs and Commands which is basically where it is now.  You can see the tabs, you can see the commands.  There’s Show tabs and then there’s Auto-Hide Ribbon.  Now let’s, first of all, look at Show Tabs.  Now if you select Show Tabs, what happens you now only see the names of the tabs.  You don’t see the commands at all.  Now you may see a bit of a problem there and you think, well, how am I going to use the dommands if I can’t see them?  And the point is that when you click on a tab, the Ribbon appears, you use it for a period of time and then it disappears again.  So, let’s suppose I select that cell there, F7.  I type something into it.  Let’s say I type the word Hello and I want to make that bold.  I know that to make it bold I need to go to the Home tab.  So click on Home, click on bold to make the content of that bold, and then as soon as I finished on that cell I’ve gone somewhere else, the Ribbon disappears again.  Now I can always bring it back by clicking on a tab.  Most of the time that I’m working the Ribbon is not in view and I just bring it into view when I need to use a Command.

Now the other option you can choose here, of course, is Auto-Hide Ribbon.  I’ll leave you to try this one yourself, but basically with Auto-Hide Ribbon, you hide the Ribbon and the tabs.  And in order to see them again, all you do is click at the very top of the application.  So at the top of the visible Window, click there and the tabs and the Ribbon will reappear.  This is very useful when you’ve got a large area of worksheet to work on and you don’t particularly need to access any of the commands on the Ribbon for a while.  You can give yourself pretty much the maximum amount of space to work with.

Now, one of the features of the Ribbon that’s new in Excel 2013, although it may not be that obvious to you, particularly if you’ve not used it before, is that many of the commands have been spaced out a little bit more and arranged a little bit more carefully to allow access on touch devices.  So, people who have fairly fat fingers like me will find that they can access the commands more easily if they’re using a touch screen.  One other aspect of using the Ribbon when you have so many commands on it, of course, is if you actually prefer to use the keyboard or if you’re limited to using a keyboard.  Now there’s a facility with the Ribbon called key tips you can use which will help you if you need those shortcuts.  And all you need to do on a conventional keyboard, if you’re going to use the keyboard I’m assuming you’ve got a keyboard, so you press the Alt key and what appears are this set of key tips.  So you can see them along there.  So for example Home, the tab for Home has got an H on it.  Insert has got an N, Page Layout has got a P, and so on.  And you can use those keyboard shortcuts to access one of the tabs.  So for instance if I wanted to access the Data tab, I just press the A key.  Now not only does that open up the Data tab but it gives me a similar set of keyboard shortcuts, key tip shortcuts, for all of the commands on that tab.  Now, that can be an extremely useful facility for the Ribbon if you are restricted to using the keyboard or if you just prefer to use the keyboard.  When you finish with the key tips, you just need to press the Alt key to hide them again.

Now there’s just one other thing I’d like to tell you about in relation to the Ribbon and that is I’ve mentioned that you can customize it.  Now customizing the Ribbon we won’t have time to cover on this course, but I’m going to quickly show you where you can find the facility to customize the Ribbon.  There are a couple of places actually, but the easiest way is to go into Options from Backstage View and then one of the options is Customize Ribbon.  Now from there, you can pretty much choose any tab on the right including creating a New tab for yourself and including creating new group or groups within a tab.  And you can add just about any command that’s available in Excel 2013 and believe me there are a lot of commands you can add to that new tab and that new group.  Now there are limits to what you can do to existing tabs and groups but usually the best bet is to create your own tab with your own groups to put the commands that you use the most on it.

In the next section, we’re going to talk about Quick Access Toolbar and in there I’m going to show you a little bit about customizing the Quick Access Toolbar.  And if you follow that I think you’ll find it enough to come back to this and customize the Ribbon if you want to.  But for now that’s it on the Ribbon.  We’re going to be using it throughout the course.  It’s time to look at the Quick Access Toolbar in the next section, so I’ll see you then.

Simon Calder

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!