A deep dive into Excel 2010's ribbon menu

Introduced in Microsoft's Office 2010, the ribbon was designed to provide a quicker and easier interface for the buttons. I will talk about a few of the home buttons on the ribbon. Under this tab you can perform some of the more commonly used functions such as format the text, formulas, pasting data and formatting tables.

 The first items, starting from the far left, is the clipboard section. From here you can cut, copy, and paste information. If you would like to invert your content and paste it into the cells, then you can select "Format Paste".

 Under the Font section you can change font style, size, superset or subset, bold, italicize, underline, draw borders around cells, fill cells a different color and change the color of your font. The for mentioned items are listed in order from top left to bottom right.

Next up is the Alignment section. The first set of buttons allows you to change the alignment to top, middle or bottom. The next button allows you to change the angle the text shows up so if you would like to have text going up and down instead of left to right. If text is too long for a cell and you don't want to elongate the cell, then you can wrap the text and it will write the text below it or wrap it to the new line.  The next buttons allow you to change the justification to your text such as left, centered or right justified. Finally, you can change the indentation for the text to left or right and increase it by 5 spaces at a time.

Under the Number menu we can change how the cell shows our data. We can set the numbers as such things as "Percentage" or "Fraction". You can change the dollar amounts to Euros or other currency. Finally, you can increase or decrease the number of decimals the numbers show.

The Styles section allows you to change a cell or cells so that they can have a colored scheme to them. They make the cells easier to read and allow you to be more organized with your data. You can also format the data as a table and choose your layout. 

The Cells section allows you to insert cells, delete cells or format them. You can select such items as listed in the picture below. 

The last item on the ribbon is Editing. From here you can use formulas to be inserted into a cell, Fill a cell or Clear it. You can also apply a filter to sort your columns. Find & Select allows you to search for data you may be looking for. You can also press the hotkey of Control+F. 

I hope you enjoyed this guide on the ribbon menu!