Excel Ribbon Introduction 1

Introduction

I have been reading and practicing different skills about Microsoft tools like Office and Excel. As it happens to me that I very easily forget things when I leave them(except some), So what am I going to do is document it in my blog as Word and Excel Tutorial Series so that I could refer to it later. In the mean time, other viewers could also benefit from it. So lets get going.

Excel Ribbon

Microsoft Excel 2007 has eight standard ribbon tabs. There are other additional tabs as well which could be added to the ribbon. There is also a contextual tab which appears when a particular element is selected. For example when a picture is selected in excel, a new tab appear under which are different commands that could be performed to a picture.

The ribbon has mainly three parts.

1. Tabs
2. Groups
3. Commands

The tabs are the highest element of the hierarchy. Each tab contains different groups and under each group contains similar kind of commands that could be performed to an element.

Home

The home tab the most general tab. Inside it contains different options like the font size, color, copy-paste utilities, text align commands, text wrap and cells merge-format commands. There are also conditional formatting utilities from where you could add rules like what will be the background of a cell depending on their values etc.

Insert

I guess this is the second most used tab. It contains options like creating a table, pivoting the table elements to analyze data, insert pictures, draw pie charts and bar diagrams, Symbols, etc.

Page Layout

This should be one of the most used tab. I contains commands for setting the design of the page. For example, its layout, margins, width-height, backgrounds etc.

Formulas

As you know that excel is mostly used to perform certain mathematical formulas and analysis on a table of data, the formulas tab is relevant for excel. Most of the groups in this tab contains commands related to some type of formulas to be performed in the data.