Ribbon is an area at the top of the screen below the Title Bar where almost all the frequently used commands are placed. It makes it easier to see and find the commands to format a document. The Ribbon groups buttons for common tasks together in tabs on a graphical interface. For example, when a user clicks the Insert tab, a Ribbon appears with buttons for items that he can insert into a document, such as clip art, a hyperlink, a picture or a table. The Ribbon can be reduced to a single line of tabs by pressing Ctrl+F1.
Full view of the Ribbon
Minimized view of the Ribbon
The Ribbon consists of the following tabs:
- Home: The Home tab contains the most frequently used Word features, such as changing fonts and font attributes, customizing paragraphs, using styles, and finding and replacing the text.
- Insert: The Insert tab handles anything that a user wants to insert into a document, such as tables, pictures, charts, hyperlinks, bookmarks, headers and footers, etc.
- Page Layout: The Page Layout tab contains the buttons to change margins, page size and orientation, set up columns, align objects, add effects and so on.
- References: The References tab handles tables of contents, footnotes, bibliographies, indexes and similar material. It also helps to insert a “Table of Authorities”, which is a list of references in a legal document.
- Mailings: The Mailings tab contains the commands concerned with mailings, from something as simple as creating labels to the more daunting task of mail merges.
- Review: The Review tab is used to check spelling and grammar, look up a word in a thesaurus, work in markup mode, review other people’s markups or compare documents.
- View: The View tab contains the buttons to change the view in any way such as displaying a ruler and gridlines, zooming in and out, splitting a window and so on.
