From the course: Excel 2019 Essential Training

Using the Quick Access Toolbar and Ribbon menu

From the course: Excel 2019 Essential Training

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Using the Quick Access Toolbar and Ribbon menu

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- [Instructor] Excel's menu system is extensive. It's at the top of the screen and it consists of a series of tabs, File, Home, Insert, Page Layout, et cetera. And below that, some icons referring to commands. The entire menu system is referred to as the ribbon. And above it, we have a feature called the Quick Access Toolbar. We'll get to that in a bit. We're looking at the worksheet Sheet1 in our workbook 01 Examples. Now, the Home tab is likely to be visible much of the time as you work with Excel. It's got a lot of familiar formatting buttons, Bold, Italic, Underline. When you're not sure of a button, you can slide over it and there's a little pop-up that reminds you of what it does or maybe tells you for the first time. Lots of choices here. Some of these features, you might not use very often. Here's one called Conditional Formatting. Sometimes we see graphics, we see some help on screen here. That's valuable. The Insert tab, a bit different. Where we add new features. For example, Pivot Table or some charts, or one of its variations, SparkLines, or a Slicer. You don't necessarily know what a lot of these are. Don't worry about understanding each single button. Some of these, you will never use. Page Layout has a lot to do with printing and getting ready for printing. Formulas tab, of course, as you would expect, has something to do with formulas as well as those built-in functions. Here are a bunch of statistical functions. Tons of them. Data tab has a lot to do with data management. How we sort data, how we filter it, how we get rid of duplicates, and so on. So one by one, you can see these various tabs here. And again, don't get overwhelmed by the presence of so many of them, but just the idea. You'll use the ones you need, and over time, some you'll get to, some you won't. We got a View tab as well. Off to left is the File tab and it's quite a bit different than the others. It takes us into what Microsoft refers to as the backstage view. Most of these commands have to do with the externals of Excel. How we save a file, how we create a new one, open a file, and also printing. And press Escape or click the arrow at the top, we go right back into Excel. The Quick Access Toolbar, located above the ribbon tabs, initially has only three buttons. A save button and then a button for undo and redo. But what's important about this part of the screen is that you can add to the buttons. And here's the idea: Maybe you start to work with Excel and realize that there's a feature on the Data tab that you often need. Perhaps it's Filter. If you're using the Home tab, and remember, it's often the most commonly visible tab that we see. How do you get to that button? You have to go back to the Data tab. So instead of doing that every single time, let's right-click on this Filter button. Remember, we would be doing this because we want it to be visible all the time. We'll right-click on it, add it to the Quick Access Toolbar. And there we see it, regardless of which tab we're working on. So it's always gonna be there. Over time, you may decide you really didn't need it that often. So you could right-click it at a later time and remove it from the Quick Access Toolbar. So think of that area as an area that can be customized and you will put buttons on it that you need frequently. You don't have to go to a particular tab. In the upper right-hand corner, you'll see a button here, Ribbon Display Options. Now, there could be times, if you want to focus on the data below, for example, in a presentation. You don't need to see those ribbon icons. You could Show the Tabs Only and the icons have disappeared, we're now seeing more rows. Or back to this button at a later time. Let's Show the Tabs and the Commands. That's the more standard view. There's even a third choice there: Auto-hide the Ribbon. Watch what happens. The Quick Access Toolbar, the tabs, and all the icons disappear and we're seeing a lot more data, we're not worried about the commands for the moment. Slide back up here and click, and that button reappears and we can Show Tabs and Commands. And so, the more often you use Excel, the more likely you'll need to use some of the many commands available in this ribbon menu system.

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