Introducing the Office interface

- Once you have your files opened in Word, PowerPoint or Excel, you're sure to notice some differences in the interface compared to the Google apps. Let's take a quick tour of the interface to get you familiar. This is not a detailed overview of the interface, just the most important details that are different compared to Google apps so you can get up and running in Office. And I want to start with Word. I have the same document open here in Word on the left and on Google Docs over on the right. So we can compare them side by side. Now the first thing you should notice is the ribbon.

In Google Docs, as well as most other simliar applications, you do not have the ribbon. Up at the top of the window though you'll see menus and the formatting bar. So if I click on these buttons here, file, edit, view and so on, it opens up these menus. Below that is the formatting bar. And if we make this window a little bit wider, this is what it typically looks like. You can change the size of your font, you can change which font you use, make it bold, italics or underline, you get options for style, pretty common formatting options.

But in Office, the ribbon replaces both the menu and the formatting bar. Up at the top of the window in Word you'll see formatting tools. And these look similar to what we just saw in Google Docs. We've got our font and our font size, bold, italics and underline, we even have cut, copy and paste, and options for styles. But this set of formatting tools are actually known as the home ribbon. We can see this little label just above it that says Home. You can get to the other ribbons by hitting these other buttons.

So if I hit this insert button we go to the insert ribbon, which gives me options for inserting new pages and new shapes and pictures. The design ribbon gives me options for themes and colors. And the page layout ribbon gives me options for the size of the page and margins and so on. So instead of digging through menus for these options, each menu is replaced by a full sized tool bar known as the ribbon. But then there's this button in the beginning, this file button that I skipped over.

This is different from the rest of the ribbon. This opens a view called backstage. This is where you would go to do common operations like create a new document, or open an existing document. So if I hit this button that says new, I can choose to create a new document. And there are a bunch of templates here, I can choose a standard blank document template, or if I scroll through here there's lots of other templates which I can use as starting points for my documents. If I go to open, this is where I would open an existing document.

There's an option to browse through recent documents that I've opened. I also have an option for OneDrive, which is Microsoft's cloud storage solution. We'll talk about this more later in the course. I can go to computer and I can browse to specific locations on my hard drive. So if I click on the browse button here I can go to my desktop, to my exercise files and then I could open up one of my other documents. And to make it a little easier to see, I'm going to hit the full screen button. Now I'm going to go back to the backstage view on this document. Some other interesting things in backstage include the info panel, which is currently selected, this gives me important information about my document. There's also options for printing the current document or closing the current document.

So if I hit close here, it just closes the document that I'm working on and I revert back to whatever document I might have open. I also want to talk a little bit about save and save as. So let's create a new document that we can save. I'm going to hit new and I'll just choose the blank document template for now, so I'll double click on that. To make this easier to see I'll flip it into full screen and I'll type a little text. If I want to keep this document I'm going to need to save it. So I go to backstage, I have save and save as.

Since I've never saved this file before, I can hit either one. Either option will do the same thing. But generally save will update any changes to a current document and save as will save a new duplicate file. But like I said since I've never saved this file before, it's going to work the same way. So I'll just hit save as. I'm going to choose a location. I'm just going to choose the desktop, in this case the name memo will be just fine and I'll hit save. So now I have two files open in Word.

How can I switch between them? Well if you remember over in Google Drive if I've got multiple documents open I can flip between them using the tabs in my browser. Each new document generally opens in a new tab. But that's not how it works in Office. Usually you'll see each document in a different window and you can click between them if those different windows are visible on the screen. But if they're stacked or if they're in the full screen view like this, you're not going to be able to see both of those windows. So instead, you can go to the view ribbon, you can go to this option that says switch windows and I can switch over to my other document. Let me switch this into full screen.

So I can go into view on this one and go to switch windows and switch back to the other. So those are the ribbons. You should click through and get familiar with them. We'll be getting more into the ribbons in the movie on formatting tools. Next I want to also point out the quick access toolbar, which is this bar of tiny buttons up at the very top. This is meant to hold some of the options that you use a lot. I see a shortcut here to save my file. This is great so I don't have to go into the backstage view every time I want to save a change. I also see buttons for undo and redo.

But I can add other commands to the quick access toolbar. If you click on this little menu button here, of course we get some options. So I might want a button to open a new document in my quick access toolbar. So I could choose that option right here, and now I've got the open button right up there at the top. But there are other commands that you can add aside from what's just on this list. To see the options we just go this option that says more commands. In the documents that I typically work on I need to insert page breaks pretty often.

So I added a shortcut to make page breaks in the quick access toolbar on my computer. To do that here, what I'm going to do is just scroll through here and I'm looking for the option to insert page breaks. And here's a category right here. Insert page breaks and section breaks. I can select that and I can hit add which adds it to the list of options on my quick access toolbar and I'll hit okay. And now I've got this button here for page breaks and similar commands in my quick access toolbar.

Before we wrap up, let's take a look at an Excel file. Inside of Excel you've got the same situation with ribbons. The home ribbon is usually activated by default but I've got some other options, I've got insert, page layout, formulas, and so on. These look pretty similar to the ribbons that you'll find in Word, but or course they will be different because this is a completely different application. And the same is true in PowerPoint. The home ribbon looks pretty much the same, but there are a bunch of other ribbons and some of those are specific to PowerPoint.

As we go through the individual applications later in this course, we'll be looking at some more interface options. But those are the important pieces that you should be aware of. The ribbon, backstage, and the quick access toolbar.