The strip of buttons across the top of Word is called the ribbon, and it is the reason Word feels overwhelming at first. It is not random. By the end of this page you will know what each tab is for, so you can guess where a button lives instead of hunting for it.
Word can do a few thousand things. Rather than showing you all of them at once, it sorts them into tabs — Home, Insert, Layout, and so on — and shows you one tab at a time. The ribbon is that row of tabs plus the buttons belonging to whichever tab is open.
- 1The row of tabs. Each one is a chapter of Word; you only ever see the buttons belonging to the open chapter.
- 2Home is the open tab here, which is why it sits on white while the others sit on grey.
- A group of buttons, named underneath
- 3Bold, drawn with a shaded box around it because it is currently switched on for the selected text.
There are only a handful of tabs worth learning, and their names describe them honestly once you know the trick: each tab answers a different question about your document.
Words people use
Try it yourself
Open Word, choose Blank document, and type one sentence.
You need something on the page for the buttons to act on. Buttons look greyed out and useless with nothing selected.
Drag across your sentence to select it, then click B on the Home tab.
Selecting first, then clicking, is the rhythm of all Word formatting: choose what, then choose how.
Click the Insert tab and look along the row, then click Layout and look again.
The tabs are worth browsing once, calmly, with nothing at stake. You are building a rough map, not memorising it.
Hover your mouse over a button you do not recognise and wait two seconds.
Word shows a small box with the button's name and what it does. This is the fastest way to learn the ribbon — the program will explain itself.
Press Ctrl and F1 together, then press it again.
That collapses the ribbon to just the tab names and brings it back. Useful if you ever open Word and the buttons appear to have vanished.
If you would rather not hunt at all, there is a search box at the top of the window. Type what you want in ordinary words — "page numbers", "double spacing" — and Word offers the command directly. Using it is not cheating; it is often faster than remembering which tab a button lives on.
Check yourself
If you can say yes to each of these, you are ready for the next lesson.
- I know the ribbon is tabs of buttons, not one giant wall
- I can say what Home, Insert, Layout and Review are each for
- I select text first, then click a formatting button
- I can hover over a button to find out what it does