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What is that smudge on the Office Ribbon?

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

In the previous post we looked at Office 2007 and the “Mystery Tabs“. Today let’s look at the Ribbon and it’s secret feature.

First, a quick overview of “The Ribbon” – In 2007 the menus are gone and replaced with a tabbed “ribbon”.

The Ribbon is set up in Groups and are organized in families. Things that never lived together before are now all on the same ribbon. For example, in Word and Excel there is a Page Layout Tab that holds nearly everything you would want when thinking about your document layout.

On the Insert Tab, the products all have a “Illustrations” group. This didn’t exist before. It is the home of  Clip Art, Pictures, Shapes (which is really the old Drawing Toolbar), and  “Smart Art” (which will need to be another post – just remember, it’s all about the bullets), which is a new way of creating diagrams. The idea is that  come of the useful, but buried features are being given a second chance to be used now that they can be easily found. In Excel many helpful features were extracted from the buried Auditing toolbar and moved out were they can be seen (and used).

In Office 2007 and 2010 click  each tab and look along the bottom of the big, thick bar (Ribbon) for labels. These are the Groups. In the picture in this post (click on the image for a larger view) you’ll see “Adjust, Picture Styles, Arrange, and Size“.  These are  the Groups for this Tab, and they have a secret.

Secret?

There are lots of ways to modify the clip art on the page. You can add frames, change colors, and so on..  Somewhere on that tab however is a button that will give you the hidden options. You won’t find it unless you have pretty good vision though.

The features are under the “Dialog Box Launcher Button” (gack, what a name). Not every group has them, but the Size Group on the Picture Tools/Format Tab does. Note:  if you don’t see that tab, click on the image. See that little grey smudge in the lower right corner of the group? It’s a grey box with a little arrow in it (and is really, really tiny). That’s the button you want. Fun, right?

So? What’s the problem?

Here’s my frustration with this button. Someone looking for hanging indents in Word (without using the ruler) can spend a long time digging around to get the 2003 dialog box to come out. It’s under the button on the Home Tab in the Font Group.

Once you find it you’re fine but it’s not exactly intuitive now is it?

 

Tags: Microsoft, Office
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