The user interface of Office 2007 has been redesigned. The old Office interface was based on menus and toolbars. Instead of menus and toolbars, Office 2007 programs have a "ribbon" at the top of the window.
The ribbon is made up of tabs, groups, and commands. In this handout we will use the ribbon from Word 2007 for our examples.
Some groups have a small box in the lower right corner:
.
You can see this button in the Clipboard, Font, and Paragraph
groups in the picture of the ribbon above. When you
see this box, you can click on it to bring up a dialog box or task
pane to execute the less frequently used commands contained in the group.
The ribbon was designed to show you the Office tools that are most relevant to what you are working on at any given moment. Therefore, additional tabs appear on the ribbon depending on the context; for example, the Table Tools tabs (Design and Layout) appear when the cursor is placed inside a table and the Picture Tools tab (Format) appears when an image is selected.
The office button
replaces the File menu. File menu commands like open, save, and print
are now found by clicking on the office button. At the bottom of the
office button menu is the exit button. In addition, this is where you will
find the options button that will let you customize many aspects of
the program.
The quick access toolbar is just above the ribbon, to the right of the office button. It contains buttons for your most commonly used commands. Initially it contains buttons for save, undo, and redo.
There are two easy ways to add your own favorites to the quick access toolbar. One method is to click the down arrow at the right end of the quick access toolbar. This brings up a menu that allows you to add commands. The other method is to find the command you want to add on the ribbon and right click on it. The menu that pops up allows you to add the command to the quick access toolbar.
There may be times that you select some text to reformat it, but you are currently working on a tab other than the Home tab. Office provides the mini toolbar so that you don't have to go back to the Home tab. Instead, when you select text, if you select the text with your mouse, the mini toolbar will pop up. Initially the mini toolbar is greyed out; if you move the cursor to it, it will become solid and then you can use it to modify the selected text. When you deselect the text, the mini toolbar disappears.
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Number 1 shows the text that is highlighted, and number 2 shows the mini toolbar. Remember that if you select text using the keyboard, you will not see the mini toolbar.
To the right of the tabs, on the right side of the window, is the help button, which is a round button that contains a question mark. Clicking on the button will bring up the help window, which initially connects to office online help. You have the option of requesting help from your own computer, and you can switch back and forth between offline and online help.
The new version of Office uses new formats for saving your documents. The extensions have all been modified by having an 'x' added, so the new formats are:
If you want to save a document so that it can be opened by an earlier version of Office, choose Save As from the office button. One of the options under Save As allows you to save a version that is compatible with earlier versions of Office.
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