Excel® 2010 Workbook for Dummies®

Chapter 1. Getting Familiar with the Excel 2010 Interface

In This Chapter

• Identifying the different parts of the Excel display screen

• Selecting commands in the Excel Backstage View

• Selecting commands on the Ribbon and Quick Access toolbar

• Customizing the Ribbon and Quick Access toolbar

The Excel 2010 interface relies primarily on the Ribbon, a block of commands displayed at the top of the screen and divided into distinct blocks called tabs. The single vestige of the old pull-down menus from versions prior to Excel 2007 is the File menu that's displayed along the left side of the brand new Backstage View screen. The File menu contains all the File commands. You open the Backstage View that contains the menu by clicking the File menu (which looks just like the Ribbon tabs in the worksheet view except that it's the only one that's green). Also, in place of the many toolbars in the pre-Excel-2007 versions, Excel 2010 offers a single toolbar called the Quick Access toolbar.

The exercises in this first chapter are designed to get you familiar with the Excel 2010 interface. As a result of doing these exercises, you should be comfortable with all aspects of the display screen and the command structure and ready to do all the rest of the exercises in this book.

Identifying the Parts of the Excel Display Screen

Before you can start using Excel 2010, you have to be familiar with its display screen. Figure 1-1 shows you the Excel 2010 display screen as it first appears when you launch the program. ...