Ribbons and Tabs in PowerPoint Online

The Ribbon
Ribbon Contents

The Ribbon

The Ribbon in PowerPoint Online is the long strip comprising tabs with buttons across the top of the main window within the PowerPoint interface. The Ribbon contains almost all the commands you need to work with your slides and is designed in a way that helps you quickly find the commands that you need to complete a task.

However, the File Menu exists in PowerPoint Online, even though it sports fewer options. All the other commands are now found in the various tabs of the Ribbon within the interface. The Ribbon has several tabs, each named as you can see in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Ribbon and tabs within the PowerPoint Online interface

Ribbon Content

The Ribbon contains many interface elements that are explained below:

1. Tabs: The Ribbon contains fixed tabs such as Home, Insert, Design, etc. Each tab contains sets of tools to create and edit slides.
2. Contextual Tabs: These are special tabs in the Ribbon that are not visible all the time. They only make an appearance when you are working with a particular slide object which can be edited using special options. Notice the Drawing Tools Format tab (highlighted in red within Figure 2). Tis is a contextual tab. Make sure that you click on the contextual tab to activate it.
3. 
   Figure 2: Contextual tab
3. Group: A group of related tools within a tab is known as a Group. Figure 3 shows Insert Shapes and Shape Styles groups within the Drawing Tools Format tab.
4. 
   Figure 3: Shape Styles group
4. A Gallery is a collection of styles or properties. Most galleries can be seen as drop-down galleries as shown in Figure 4. To access the drop-down galleries, you click the More button (explained in the next point). Figure 4 shows the Shape Styles gallery. All available styles can be seen as small preview thumbnails.
5. 
   Figure 4: Shape Styles Gallery
5. The More button expands to a gallery within a Ribbon tab so that all or more options can be seen. Figure 5 shows you the More button for the Shape Styles gallery (highlighted in red).
6. 
   Figure 5: More button
6. The Down Arrow is a small downward pointing triangle that's placed next to many buttons. When clicked, this displays a gallery or an additional options/sub-menu related to the selected button. You can see the Down Arrow (highlighted in red) next to the Shape Fill option in Figure 6.
7. 
   Figure 6: Down Arrow