Joyce Cox - Microsoft Office Home & Student 2010 Step by Step

Office 2010 includes new features, new functionality, and an easy-to-use interface intended to streamline your computing experience and make it easier to learn new programs. Were excited to bring you this glimpse into the inner workings of selected features in the core Office programs. Well start with the basics and work into the most interesting and necessary features of each program. If you are an experienced Office user, you can skim and jump right into the program-specific chapters.

The goal of the Microsoft Office 2010 working environment is to make working with Office filesincluding Microsoft Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations, Outlook e-mail messages, and Access databasesas intuitive as possible. You work with an Office file and its contents by giving commands to the program in which the document is open. All Office 2010 programs organize commands on a horizontal bar called the ribbon , which appears across the top of each program window whether or not there is an active document.

A typical program window ribbon.

Commands are organized on task-specific tabs of the ribbon and in feature-specific groups on each tab. Commands generally take the form of buttons and lists. Some appear in galleries in which you can choose from among multiple options. Some groups have related dialog boxes or task panes that contain additional commands.

Throughout this book, we discuss the commands and ribbon elements associated with the program feature being discussed. In this section, we discuss the general appearance of the ribbon, things that affect its appearance, and ways of locating commands that arent visible on compact views of the ribbon.

Note

See Also For detailed information about the ribbon, see .

Tip

Some older commands no longer appear on the ribbon but are still available in the program. You can make these commands available by adding them to the Quick Access Toolbar. For more information, see .

Dynamic Ribbon Elements

The ribbon is dynamic, meaning that the appearance of commands on the ribbon changes as the width of the ribbon changes. A command might be displayed on the ribbon in the form of a large button, a small button, a small labeled button, or a list entry. As the width of the ribbon decreases, the size, shape, and presence of buttons on the ribbon adapt to the available space.

For example, when sufficient horizontal space is available, the buttons on the Review tab of the Word program window are spread out and youre able to see more of the commands available in each group.

The Review tab of the Word program window at 1024 pixels wide.

If you decrease the width of the ribbon, small button labels disappear and entire groups of buttons are hidden under one button that represents the group. Click the group button to display a list of the commands available in that group.