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text on buttons may be removed, leaving only images.small buttons may be displayed instead of large ones.On a small monitor, or if the user chooses to use a small window: The Ribbon expands and contracts to fit the window in which it is displayed. The Ribbon expands and contracts to fit the available space For example, in Figure 5 you can see the Table Styles and Draw Borders groups. The name of the group is below the controls in that group. Watch out for these tabs, because they contain the controls you need to format items like tables, pictures and text boxes.įigure 5: The Table Tools contextual tab appears when you click within a table Tabs are divided into groupsĮach tab has several groups.
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You'll see similar contextual tools if you click on a picture, edit a header or footer, or click in a text box. If you click in a table, two extra Table Tools tabs appear: one for Design and one for Layout (Figure 5). "Contextual tabs" appear and disappear as you work. Extra "Contextual" tabs appear on special occasions And Word 2010 does it even less well than Word 2007. The Add-Ins tab doesn't do a very good job of displaying the old-style toolbar. If you open a template or add-in created in Word 2003 or before, which has a custom toolbar, you'll see something like that custom toolbar on the Add-Ins tab. In addition, you can display the Developer tab, and you might see an Add-Ins tab. In Word, seven tabs display by default: Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review and View. One of the biggest differences between old-fashioned toolbars and the new-fashioned Ribbon is that the Ribbon is divided into tabs. When you hover over a split button you'll see horizontal line splitting the big button into two. Look out for split buttons (Figure 3 and Figure 4). There are also boxes where you can type a value directly into the Ribbon. Menus are indicated by a small down-ward pointing triangle.
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The two most common are buttons and menus. The Ribbon can display many different kinds of controls. When I hover over the top half of the Paste control, the tooltip makes it clear that this is a button.įigure 4: When I hover over the bottom half of the Paste control, I can see that when I click the bottom half, I'll see a menu Figure 3: The Paste control is a split button.
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