The Publisher 2013 Interface: Navigating the Ribbon
The interface to Microsoft Publisher 2013 features many sections and commands. The upper portion of the interface contains the Quick Access Toolbar and Ribbon functionality, the latter of which contains numerous commands organized into Groups which are themselves organized into Tabs. Common Tabs in the Ribbon include the Home, Insert, Page Design, Mailings, Review and View Tabs. Below the Ribbon, Publisher provides a Pages pane and a Workspace with an optional Scratch Area for the user; in addition, Scroll Bars are included on the right side of the screen. The Status Bar is found at the bottom of the interface.
Watch the free video here, transcripts for the entire video follow:
Do you need to learn Microsoft Publisher 2013? Get over 6 hours of Microsoft Publisher 2013 training – click here.
Video transcripts:
Once you have created a new publication and generally understand the components of the “backstage view”, it’s important to become comfortable with the rest of the Publisher application’s interface.
Let’s start from the top of the screen and work our way down to better understand the components of the interface. First, in the upper left hand corner of the screen, you will see the Quick Access Toolbar which is present in the other Microsoft Office products. The Quick Access Toolbar contains icons for frequent performed commands within the application. By default, the Save, Undo, Redo, and Print Preview icons are available within Publisher. If you’d like to add additional icons to this toolbar in order to save you time in the future, click the arrow icon to the right of the icons. A drop down list of popular commands will be displayed. If you’d like to add any of these icons such as New or Open, simply select them from the list and they will appear on the Quick Access Toolbar. If you’re looking for a command that is notice displayed in the list, select “More Commands” to open the Publisher Options dialog box.
Within this area, you can search through the commands listed on the left hand side. By default, Publisher will display a long list of popular commands; however, if you still aren’t able to find the command or commands that you are looking for, select All Commands from the Choose Commands From: drop down menu. From this alphabetical list, find the command that you’d like to add. In this example, I’m going to add the “Group” icon to the list. Select the command and click the Add button to move this command’s icon to the list on the right hand side. You can reorder your commands by selecting the commands and using the up and down arrows to reposition your command icons to your preference. Then, you would want to repeat these steps until all of your desired icons are added. When finished, click the OK button.
Just below the Quick Access Toolbar you’ll see the ribbon. The ribbon is made up of tabs such as Home, Insert, Page Design, Mailings, Review, and View. Then, within each tab you’ll notice that your command icons are grouped and those groups are labeled such as Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Styles, Objects, Arrange, and Editing. As you move through the tabs in the Ribbon, the available commands will change.
Within the Home tab, you’ll find a lot of formatting options for your text, the ability to insert objects such as text boxes, pictures, tables, and shapes, and ability to manage these objects within your publication using commands within the Arrange group. The editing group allows you to find certain text or formatting with in the document and the replace option will allow you to find specific text or formatting and replace it with something else.
The Insert tab provides you with commands for inserting objects within your publication. In addition to inserting objects, you also have the option to insert pages or catalog pages as well.
The Page Design tab allows you to change properties of the page such as its margins, orientation, and size. In addition to these options, this tab contains commands related to color schemes, font schemes, and the page’s background.
The Mailings tab allows users to complete a mail merge with their publication. This can be helpful for creating publication that will contain a mailing address or catalog containing product descriptions. We’ll definitely dive into this topic in more detail in a later chapter.
The Review tab had commands available for a spell check, researching dictionaries or the web, a thesaurus, and text translation.
Finally, the View tab allows you to view Master pages, show or hide elements such as guides, rulers, the scratch area, or baselines – all of which we’ll discuss in details later. You have options for changing how you view your document with zoom, as well as how to handle multiple publication windows that are open at the same time.
Below the Ribbon on the left hand side of the screen, you’ll notice the Pages pane. This pane can be hidden by select the left arrow, or displayed again by selecting the right arrow. If you’d like to resize this page, you can hover your mouse over the right edge until you see a double left and right arrow, left click, hold, and drag your mouse to the left or right. Within this pane, notice that you’ll see a list of all the pages within the publication. These pages are displayed as thumbnails that you can easily click to navigate around the publication. In this case, we only have one page, but you’ll notice later that as we add more, they will be displayed in this left hand pane.
In the middle of the screen, you’ll be able to see the workspace where your blank page is displayed. The extra space around the blank page is called the “Scratch Area” which is where you can store objects such as images until you are ready to place them in their appropriate place within the publication. When the “Scratch Area” setting is turned on, these objects will be displayed in this blank area around the page, despite which page you’re viewing within the publication. If you turn off the “Scratch Area”, this blank space will still be visible; however, your objects will not be visible in this area.
On the right hand side of the screen and just below the publication area, you’ll see your scroll bars which allow you to move up and down or left to right within your publication.
Finally, let’s takes a look at the Status Bar that is displayed at the bottom of the screen. On the left hand side, you’ll notice Page 1 of 1 displayed. As you add more pages to your publication and begin navigating through each one, this is a good reminder of where you are at within the publication. Notice though that if I click on Page 1 of 1, the Page pane we discussed earlier will disappear. If we click Page 1 of 1 again, the Page pane will reappear, so as you can see, this is just another quick way to open and close that pane, if needed.
As your mouse moves around the document, the precise location of the mouse will be displayed in the status bar as well in the “Object Position” area of the status bar. Since we have no objects in position yet, it’s simply displaying the precise location of the mouse as we move it around.
Clicking on the small XY or objective size icon in the status bar will bring up the measurements box. This box is helpful in displaying the measurements and precise location of a select object within the publication. Since we don’t have any objects displayed yet, notice that the box is empty.
On the right hand side, there are two icons for viewing the document, the Single Page view (which is the default) and the two page spread view. To the right of these icons, you’ll notice what is called the Zoom Slider. The Zoom slider allows you to move the zoom slider bar to the left or right in order to zoom in and out of your publication. The percentage of your zoom is displayed to the right. Finally, the last icon in this status bar is displayed is the Show Whole Page icon. This allows you to automatically display the entire page within the screen.
If at any time, you’d like to remove the options from the status bar, right-click your mouse in the status bar and select which item you’d like to remove.
Now that you have a better understanding of the interface, let’s move on to learn how we can insert, delete, move, rename, and reorder pages within our publication.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
