Usability Improvements in Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 Ribbon Interface

PowerPoint 2013 continues to improve upon the intuitive Ribbon interface through the addition of a touch mode and improved context features. Touch mode is designed to make PowerPoint 2013 more usable on touchscreen devices like tablets. When activated, buttons and menus are spaced more generously, making it easy to select options with a fingertip. Touch mode also introduces mini toolbars, which take the place of the context sensitive right-click menu, and provide comfortable fingertip access to the same functionality. Touch mode can be activated by clicking the pointing finger icon at the top left of the screen.

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Video transcripts:

Welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013. In this section, we’re going to start to look at the Ribbon and toolbars. And in this section in particular, we’re going to concentrate on the Ribbon. And the Ribbon is very much the center of the interface between you and PowerPoint 2013. If you’ve used the Ribbon before, you’ve maybe used a recent version of PowerPoint or another component of Office, then you’ll understand the basic principle of the Ribbon. But I should warn you that it has changed in Office 2013 and the first thing we’re going to look at is what is probably the most significant aspect of that change.
So I pointed out to you what and where the Ribbon is earlier on in the course and above the Ribbon there is the Quick Access Toolbar. And on the Quick Access Toolbar one of the buttons has a pointing finger. To the right of that pointing finger, there is a little drop down arrow and if we click on that we are given the choice between mouse and touch. Now I’m currently in what we’ll call mouse mode. If I click on touch and go into touch mode watch what happens to that Ribbon. Basically everything gets spaced out more. The Ribbon has lots of little commands on it, which we’re going to talk about in a moment, but they’re all spaced out more and that is to give you room to touch those commands and those buttons with your fingertips rather than using the relative accuracy of clicking with a mouse.

We’re now going to look at the Ribbon in detail but you may want to go into the right mode for you first. So if you’re using touch, go up to that drop down, go to touch. If you’re using the mouse, click, go back into mouse mode.

Now one thing to note about the Ribbon is these little command buttons that I’ve talked about. They’re all rather gray looking at the moment and the reason they’re rather gray looking is that we don’t have a presentation open. So the first thing I’m going to do now is to open a presentation. Now once I have a presentation open, the situation changes because now I can see that some of the buttons are dark and some of them are still gray. And basically the difference is that the ones that are dark you can see the words on them and the actual buttons themselves are basically black rather than gray, they are enabled. Now if you look at this button here it says New slide. If I wanted to create a new slide, I would click that button. And at the moment, I can create a new slide. I’ve got three. If I clicked that, I’d get number four. But all of the buttons here, this whole group of buttons here, they’re all gray and I can only use those when I have something selected. Normally, I would have some text selected, because they’re the buttons that I use to change the font in use on some text in a presentation. So the first thing to note is that some of these buttons are useable and some of them are not, and you can tell whether they are enabled like these ones or disabled like these ones. We sometimes say disabled; we sometimes say grayed out.

So what of the Ribbon itself? Well, at the top of the Ribbon you see these words: Home, Insert, Design, Transitions. At the moment, you can see that Home is highlighted and this is the Home tab. When we click on one of these, so in this case Home, we see a particular set of content on the Ribbon. Now the content here is arranged into groups and the first group, the group on the left here on the Home tab is the Clipboard Group, then we have the Slides Group, the Font Group, the Paragraph Group, etc. Now if I click on the next tab, the Insert tab, I have different groups. I have Slides, Tables, Images, Illustrations, etc. And the Design tab has its own groups, etc. So one of the features is we have all these tabs and on each tab there are a number of groups. Now with the groups, we have a number of different commands and the commands take different forms. Some of them are very straightforward commands where you basically just click a button. I mentioned now New slide. That’s actually a command that’s in two parts. If you just click the top part watch what happens here, our new slide, all that happens is I get a new slide. Some of the other commands need quite a bit more work done on them. For instance, if you look at the Clipboard Group in the bottom right hand corner, there’s a thing called a Dialog Box Launcher and if I click on that Dialog Box Launcher and you’ll see that other groups have Dialog Box Launchers as well, although not all groups do. What that does is to bring up either a dialog box or an additional panel and we follow some instructions or make some selections in order to carry out whatever operation we need to carry out. So what happens when you click something on the Ribbon varies quite a lot. Now obviously during the course we’re going to be looking at many of these commands and what they do so I’m not going to go into them in great detail now. But it’s important to recognize that different commands work in different ways and sometimes they’re a single click, click once something happens, in others you’re actually starting off quite a long chain of events and operations.

So what I’ve just done is to insert a picture on to this slide. You’ll see how to insert pictures yourself later on. But not that if I select that picture, so if I click on that picture, what happens is apart from the picture itself getting this sort of selection rectangle around it is if you look up at the Ribbon there is now a new tab. It wasn’t there before, and it’s what’s called a contextual tab. It’s the sort of tab that only appears under certain circumstances. One of the circumstances in which contextual tabs appear is if you have a picture selected and then you have tabs that come under the heading of picture tools and the tab you see here is the Format tab. Now with that tab visible, you can select it and then you have a number of commands arranged into groups that are appropriate for formatting a picture, hence the name of the tab. There are various other things you can do such as insert a table and in each of those cases you will get contextual tabs. So although we have a basic set of tabs which are basically the ones from Home to View plus another one that we haven’t seen yet. There are also in addition contextual tabs that appear depending on the situation that applies at that time.

Now one thing you may be aware of if you’ve been using the Ribbon for a while or even if you’re new to the Ribbon you may look at it now and say the Ribbon actually takes up quite a lot of space doesn’t it? If you’re trying to work on something where you need to see a lot of detail you don’t want to lose probably about 15%, 20% of the working area to the Ribbon. Well, certainly once you’re used to using the Ribbon you can overcome this in a couple of ways. One of the ways is to basically minimize the Ribbon, which doesn’t stop you using it; it just means you use it in a different way. If I hover over this little arrow to the bottom right hand corner of the Ribbon, you’ll see that its screen tip is Collapse the Ribbon. Need a bit more space? Collapse the Ribbon so only the tab names show. If you click on that you certainly have more space to work in. You may say well, how do I execute the commands because I can’t see them anymore, they’ve all disappeared? The answer to that is that if you know where your commands are then you click on the appropriate tab. Let’s suppose I want to do something on the Home tab, click on the Home tab and once you’ve clicked on it, the Ribbon appears until you execute one of these commands. So you can actually say, right, I want to arrange some shapes or I want to put in a new slide. Once you’ve executed a command, the Ribbon will then collapse back down again and move out of view. So that’s one very good way of making more space available to work in PowerPoint 2013.

Now if you do decide to work in that way, then if you need to revert back to having the Ribbon visible all the time, the button on the bottom right hand corner of the Ribbon now says Pin the Ribbon. Like seeing the Ribbon? Keep it open while you work. If you click on that again, then the Ribbon is now visible all of the time and doesn’t auto-collapse anymore.

And there is another and more flexible way of achieving the same thing now in PowerPoint 2013. To the right of the Help question mark up here, there is a button that’s called the Ribbon Display options. If I click on Ribbon Display options, you see I have three options: Auto-Hide Ribbon, Show tabs, and Show tabs and commands. Now Show tabs and commands basically means the Ribbons is there and open all of the time. Show tabs is really the collapse version that we just saw. Show Ribbon tabs only, click a tab to show the commands. That’s what we did just now. Now the third option, the top option, Auto-Hide Ribbon is one where the Ribbon is hidden all of the time and there is then a button to click at the top of the application to show the Ribbon again. Now I can’t actually show you that because the way that this works in PowerPoint 2013 is incompatible with the software that I’m using to record this course. But give it a try yourself. It’s very straightforward. You click that option, you no longer see the Ribbon or the tabs, but you do have a button that you click very similar to the one that you can see now at the top of this little mini menu. You click that and then you can reset to one of the three options. Obviously, if you want to go back to just showing the tabs you choose the second option or the lower option if you want to show tabs and commands.

If you’re new to the Ribbon and perhaps if you’re new to PowerPoint or PowerPoint 2013, at least you may want to leave the tabs and commands visible for the moment. But as you’re skills, knowledge, and experience grow, you may find that you know where the commands that you use are on the tabs and you don’t really need to see the full Ribbon all of the time. The other thing to bear in mind as we’ll see later on and during the rest of the course is that very often you can execute the commands you need without even using the Ribbon. Let me show you a particular example of that. I’ve still got this slide with a picture. If I right click on the picture, what I see is a contextual menu and that menu contains many of the commands and options that I may want to apply to this picture. Now exactly what appears on the menu depends on what I right click on, hence the term contextual. But it will certainly cover the main things that I may want to be able to do to this picture. This means that I could use the contextual menu instead of the Ribbon; for example to change the size and position or to go into formatting the picture in some way. Now if you want to do the same thing with touch, note that if I were say outside the slide, so let me tap outside the slide with my finger. To select this picture, I just tap once to bring up the selection handles. If I now tap again, I bring up a mini toolbar. We’re going to talk about mini toolbars later on, but at the right hand end of that there’s a little drop down arrow. If I tap on the drop down arrow, then I get a contextual menu using touch. Now the commands on that are different, but the principles the same and generally speaking, you can achieve the same things by using this approach with touch. And again, this avoids the need to use the Ribbon to perform the most common operations on this picture.

So there’s just one other thing to look at in relation to the Ribbon before we move on; if I right click on the Ribbon, one of the options is Customize the Ribbon. Click on Customize the Ribbon and what you see is the PowerPoint Options dialog with Customize Ribbon selected. Now on this page, you have on the right a panel and that panel lists all of the main tabs at the moment. See main tabs is selected at the top. Now the Home tab is first on the list and within that we have a list of all of the groups on the main tab. So there’s Clipboard, Slides, Font, and so on, as we saw earlier on. If I click on the plus sign next to a group, I can see the commands that are included in that group. And in some cases, those commands are further subdivided or subcategorized. This is currently the default setup for PowerPoint 2013. The Ribbon tabs that you can see here are the ones that appear by default. There is one standard tab that is not currently shown and that’s the Developer tab. I mentioned to you earlier on in this section that one of the tabs you couldn’t see, that’s Developer. If I wanted to show the Developer tab, I would tick here and click on OK. The reason the Developer tab is not shown by default in PowerPoint 2013 is because it’s primarily associated with programming, with VBA, and therefore if somebody wants that, they’re going to know that’s what they need and they’re going to enable it. And it can tend to be a little bit dangerous in the hands of people who perhaps aren’t fully aware of what they might do with the Developer tab. I’m going to uncheck it for now because we’re not going to need it on this course.

Now as we’ve already seen apart from those main tabs there are other tabs such as contextual tabs. We saw earlier on, in fact you can just see it peeking out the top here, the Format tab when you have an image or picture selected. But the pattern’s the same; each tab can have groups on it and each group can have commands in it. The list of available commands is in this big long box on the left here. It’s a very long list. This list is only popular commands. If you actually look at All commands, you would see that in PowerPoint 2013 there are many commands.

And you can create your own tab. There’s a button down there, New tab. On your tab, you can create a new group. You could rename that group and you can move commands from the list on the left into your group or into your groups on your tabs. So you can basically build up your own sort of extension to the Ribbon.

Now that is outside the scope of this course. I really wanted to show you that this is possible without going through in any detail how to do it. If that is going to be of value in the future, then it’s certainly something you can look up on the internet or in fact if you look at the PowerPoint Help, it gives you some good information about how to do that. One of the areas, one of the situations where I think this can be very useful is if you routinely use a particular combination of commands when you’re doing the work that you do and those commands are on different ones of the standard tabs. You can create your own tab with perhaps four or five groups and each of those groups has some of the commands that you need for these standard processes that you perform, and I think that kind of thing can be very useful. But as I say, customizing the Ribbon is outside the scope of this course and that’s really it on the Ribbon for now. In the next section, we’re going to look at the Quick Access Toolbar. So please join me for that.

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!