Exploring Access 2007 - Using the Ribbon
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The Main menu and the toolbars are gone; in their place you have a "ribbon." The ribbon consolidates all of the relevant information you need to use in Access 2007 in this centralized location. No more menus, sub-menus, and sub-sub-menus. The stress involved in finding a control or a property by drill down is reduced, allowing you to focus on the ribbon. The next picture shows where you need to make your first click. Everything you want to do starts from here, the Microsoft Office Button, the over-sized round button with the Office logo.
Any time you need help just press F1. This is what shows up in a separate window when you click on F1. Well, you need to activate your program so that Microsoft can track down software piracy. The program I am using has already been activated, although presently I am not connected to the Internet.
When you click the Microsoft Office button icon you will see the following window, which is really a new package for the items that you used to see in other screens. Of course you can create new and open existing databases as well as manage your database from here.
Clicking on the Access Options at the bottom of the screen will show you the following screen. This is where Microsoft has done a good job of consolidating information and presenting it clearly. As you can see from the navigation items you can do a lot of things from here.
However everything has been crammed into these navigated items with lots of details. This is shown for the Object Designers menu item in the next picture.
In the Personalize menu you can customize the items which will affect the MS Office programs such as: ScreenTips, Shortcut keys; color schemes; default database file and default database folder; and sort order for a new database. You may also set the language from a literally vast number of languages from Afrikaans to Yoruba including many lesser known South Indian and African languages. You can even find Kannada, the language spoken by the master programmers in Bangalore, India. In the Datasheet menu you can make changes to how the data sheet looks, such as default colors, gridlines and cells to default fonts and font options. Although I am not sure why one would go to such an extent to make the data sheet look that good.
The proofing menu really customizes how you make proof reading your document easier like auto correction, flagging repeated words, applying accents to foreign words, and so forth.
The advanced menu options deal with editing of the records, and display (show status bar, show animation, show Smart tags, Macro design options, etc). Setting printing options can be configured. The general tab allows you to specify features such as four-digit year; user interface errors with sound feedback; and so on. The Web Options... is not active except for read-only files (probably this is set for the future Data Access Pages inclusion in a future version).
The service options are for tracking user interaction for monitoring purposes; it sends back information to MS. In Access 2007 the Quick Access Toolbar has mushroomed into a mini-application in itself; you can add/remove programs from a large number of items, from database related items to DML operations as shown in this Customization Menu item. The new format caters to Access 2000(v9),2002-2003(v10) and the new Access 2007(v12) formats.
I made a few selections, threw in a Separator and created a quick access tool bar. When I clicked OK to the selection the display changed as shown.
This created a short toolbar with my chosen items. The tooltips show the menu item in text when you hover over the items as shown.
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