Using the Ribbon

You're probably used to the Office Ribbon from working with other Microsoft programs like Word, or Excel. Project's Ribbon tabs are different from those programs, but they make a lot of sense because they focus on major aspects of projects; project themselves, tasks, resources, and so on. When you first open a project, it goes to the TASK tab. But we're going to go to the FILE tab first because it's the first one on the Ribbon. Clicking the FILE tab takes you to what's called the Backstage View.

Now it's called the Backstage I guess basically because we're Project rock-stars, but anyway, the Backstage View has all sorts of file management features, so, you can get information about your current project, you can create new ones, open them, save them, print things about your project, share them, set options, and so on. Then when you are done, you want to get back to the Ribbon itself, click the back arrow and you go back to the TASK tab. Well, the Task tab has all sorts of task related commands. So you can do things like choose a task related view, you can insert new tasks over here in the INSERT section, get information about a selected task, you can link tasks in the Schedule section, and one of my favorites, which is Scroll to Task, which will actually scroll the time scale so you can see the selected task.

The RESOURCE tab on the other hand, is about resources. So you can do things like add resources, assign them to tasks. And once they're assigned tasks, you can level them to level their assignments so they're not overworked. The REPORT tab is new to Project 2013, and it assembles everything about reports all in one place. So you can get to the new graphical reports, or you can run a visual report. And within this, you can also customize the reports that you choose.

The PROJECT tab relates to the overall project. So for example, you can get project information, set the start date or the status date, that kind of thing. You can also change the working time or set a baseline. Now the VIEW tab is for settings for views in general. So the first two sections let you choose Task Views, or Resource Views. But then you can do things like sort what's in the view or apply a filter, or a group.

You can also change the time units that appear in the timescale, or which panes that you see in the view. The FORMAT tab has settings for the view that you're looking at. And you can tell that because there is a label above the FORMAT tab. In this case, it says GANTT CHART TOOLS, so you know this FORMAT tab has tools specifically for a Gantt Chart View. If you apply a different view, you'll see different settings. Now there are some things you can do with the Ribbon itself.

The Ribbon takes up a little bit of space at the top of the screen. So if you want to use that space to look at your project, you can collapse the Ribbon. Just right-click anywhere in the Ribbon, and choose Collapse the Ribbon. You can actually click this up-arrow over on the right side as well. And then all you see are the tab labels. Well, if you click a label, then the TASK tab appears, and when you click a command, it disappears again. If you want to see the Ribbon again, just right-click, choose Collapse the Ribbon to turn off the check mark, and now it comes back.

The other thing the Ribbon does is it will actually adjust what it shows depending on the width of your window. So to see how this works, look at the Insert Section, and you can see that there are buttons for inserting different types of tasks. Well, if I make the window smaller, you can see that the Insert section goes down to a single button with a down-arrow. If I click that down-arrow, now I can see all the commands and I can pick one. Then if I maximize the window again, it goes back to its full width so you can see all the commands the same time.

The Project Ribbon is organized to make it easy to choose the commands you want. It has lots of features to streamline your work. If you're new to the Ribbon, making the switch doesn't take long.