Ribbon and Galleries in Office 2007

The Office 2007 suite will use a context-sensitive ribbon of command icons and galleries of command results to make frequently used commands more visible and help users find the commands and options they want.

Shown here is a user editing a slide in PowerPoint 2007. At the top are command tabs (such as “Slides” and “Insert”), which users click on to expose commands in the ribbon just below. The user here has clicked on the “IGX Graphic Tools Create” tab to create a diagram of a process with several steps. Many command tabs are context-sensitive: They appear automatically based on what the user is doing at the moment. For example, the “Create” and “Edit” tabs appear because the user is currently editing a diagram. (The “File” menu at top left is the exception to the model: Rather than a command tab, it is a traditional drop-down menu that remains available regardless of what the user is doing.)

Many commands appear in galleries. Each item in a gallery is an icon that represents a command with specific combinations of options and provides a thumbnail image of the results of the command. When the user chooses an item, the document automatically changes to preview the results. The user here has chosen the second sequence layout from a gallery of four choices in the ribbon and now sees a preview of how the slide will look with that choice. Users can bring up traditional dialog boxes to fine-tune options if they need some combination of options that is not available in a gallery.