This is most likely the last week for Windows 10 tips so grab ’em while you can. It has been fun sharing questions from emails with you about W10 but next week on to an adventure I recently had.
Today I want to talk about the ribbon. The ribbon first appeared in Microsoft Office 2007. Basically the ribbon is a wide menu area at the top of the application window below the title bar. I have never really understood this since it takes up more room and is just as intricate to navigate as the old dropdown menu system. However, MS did not ever ask my opinion.
To see it in action open File Explorer (same as last week, not Internet Explorer but the folder button in the taskbar near the start menu button). Explorer will open a window showing Desktop, Documents and many other things depending on your settings.
Notice at the top you will see tabs labeled Home, Share and View. If you click them, you will see the ribbon below them with commands, which work in that particular area. Since I commented that the ribbon takes up a lot of space on the screen here is how to “hide” it until you need it again. Double click on any one of the tabs, say Home for example. It will appear to fold up and hide and only show the tabs. To see it and use the commands under it click it once and it will appear again. Click anywhere off of it and the ribbon will hide again.
If you try this and decide you want to have the ribbon on full time like it was, double click a tab again and it will go back to the default setting. This works on any application having the ribbon like most Microsoft Office products.
The search box is there from older versions but in W10 it is more useful and much quicker. Pretend for a minute that you have over 1,300 columns you have written over the past 15 years (a real example from my files). Now suppose you wrote a column on Chromecast sometime during that period. You can type Chromecast in the search box in the upper right corner and press enter. In less than a second you get eight results.
Suppose you now want to narrow it down to Google Chromecast so you search for that but you still get the same eight documents. Put quotation marks around it like this, “Google Chromecast” and press enter. I find only one document out of all 1,300 that has that exact phrase very, very quickly. Is there a particular type of file you want to find, say an old PowerPoint presentation you made 5 years ago? Search for .ppt (the extension for PowerPoint presentation) and find 200 of them you wrote. Sort by modified date and you are done.
OK, I just realized I have at least one more Windows 10 tip from emails, so forget what I said in the beginning of this article…they keep on coming.
