How to Work with the Office 2010 Ribbon

All Office 2010 applications have a common navigation system called the Ribbon, which is a tabbed ribbon across the top of the application window. Each tab is like a page of buttons. To work in the ribbon, click on the various tabs, which give you access to groups of buttons and features. Within a tab, the buttons are organized into groups.
Each Office application has a set of tabs for the tasks it performs. For example, Word has a Mailing tab that contains commands for performing mail merge operations. Excel has a Formulas tab that contains commands for setting up calculations.
You may find tabs added by third-party (non-Microsoft) programs. For example, if you have a program called Adobe Acrobat installed, you might have an Acrobat tab in every Office application.
Buttons and controls on tabs work in different ways:

1. On/Off toggle: When the button is selected (it turns orange), the feature is on. Each time you click the button, it toggles between on and off.
2. Command buttons: When the button is clicked, the command is executed. If you click the command button again, the command will be repeated.
3. Connected groups of buttons: In connected groups of buttons, selecting the button cancels (cancels) the previous selection in the group.
4. Menu buttons: buttons with arrows to open menus or color palettes.
You can hover your mouse pointer over the button to see a popup box, called a ScreenTip, that tells us the button’s name and/or purpose.
With some buttons that have arrows, you can click anywhere on the face of the button – directly on the arrow or not – to open the menu or panel. For others, the button and arrow face are separate clickable areas. Clicking the arrow opens the menu, but clicking the button face applies whatever setting was recently chosen from the list.
To see the difference between the two types of menu buttons, point your mouse at the button. If you see a thin line separating the arrow from the face of the button, this is the kind where you have to click directly on the arrow to get the menu. If there is no separator line, you can click anywhere on the button.
In the lower right corner of many groups there is a small square with an arrow. Clicking this button will open a dialog box related to this group. The dialog contains controls for each button in that group as well as more options not available on the ribbon.
At the far right of the ribbon is a question mark button, a help button. You can click Help at any time to open the Help system for the application you have open.

When you resize the application window so that the window is narrower than usual, or when you run the application on a computer with low-resolution video settings, the controls on the ribbon press. Some groups turn into individual buttons with dropdown menus to access the individual controls within that group.
Above the main part of the ribbon is the Quick Access Toolbar. You can add buttons for frequently used commands here. To add a button, right-click on any control from any tab and choose Add to Quick Access Toolbar. To change the position of the Quick Access Toolbar, right-click on it and choose Show Quick Access Toolbar Below the Ribbon (or above, if it’s already below).