Page 40 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

22 Excel’s Ribbon User Interface
To get more of the Worksheet area displayed in the program window, you can minimize the Ribbon so that only its tabs are displayed. (In fact, this Tabs display option is the default setting for Excel 2013 running on touch- screen computers like the Microsoft Surface tablet.)
You can minimize the Ribbon by doing any of the following:
✦ Click the Collapse the Ribbon button (the button with the caret symbol in the lower-right corner of the Excel Ribbon).
✦ Double-click a Ribbon tab.
✦ PressCtrl+F1.
✦ Click the Shows Tabs item on the Ribbon Display Options button’s drop- down menu.
To redisplay the entire Ribbon and keep all the command buttons on the selected tab displayed in the program window, click the tab and then select the Pin the Ribbon button (the one with the push-pin icon that replaces the Unpin the Ribbon button). You can also do this by double-clicking one of the tabs or pressing Ctrl+F1 a second time, or even by selecting the Show Tabs and Commands item on the drop-down menu that appears when you click or tap the Ribbon Display Options button.
When you work in Excel with the Ribbon minimized, the Ribbon expands each time you select one of its tabs to show its command buttons, but that tab stays open only until you select one of its command buttons. The moment you select a command button, Excel immediately minimizes the Ribbon again so that only the tabs display.
Note, however, that when Excel expands a tab on the collapsed Ribbon, the Ribbon tab overlaps the top of the worksheet, obscuring the header with the column letters as well as the first couple of rows of the worksheet itself. This setup can make it a little harder to work when the Ribbon commands you’re selecting pertain to data in these first rows of the worksheet. For example, if you’re centering a title entered in cell A1 across several columns to the right with the Merge & Center command button on the Home tab, you can’t see the result of selecting the button until you once again minimize the Ribbon by selecting a visible cell in the worksheet. If you then decide you don’t like the results or want to further refine the title’s formatting, you need to redis- play the Home tab of the Ribbon once again, which obscures the cells in the top two rows all over again! (The workaround for this is to do most of your formatting with the commands on the mini-bar that appears when you right- click a cell selection so that you don’t have to open the minimized Ribbon at all. See the section on formatting cells with the mini-bar in Book II, Chapter 2 for details.)