The Ribbon UI is the most visible new thing in Office 2007, or at for least the programs that have it. Those programs are Access, Excel, Outlook (except the main window), PowerPoint and Word. It presents a radical departure from the standard UI tenants based around menus and toolbars. For some, it is the worst thing of Office 2007, for others the best. This post is going to give a quick overview of it.
You might wonder what I possibly could have to say about the new Ribbon UI, that hasn’t been discussed elsewhere already. Not much really, but I do have some terminology to take care of I took those screenshots in Vista with a non-reference resolution of 1280×1024, so the Ribbon might look a bit different for you in a lower or higher resolution. The reference resolution for Office 2007 is 1024×768.

Above you see the Word Ribbon, or more generically, a Ribbon. Note that this is ONE Ribbon only and that the Ribbon includes the Office button menu, the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT), all tabs and all contextual tabs. Access, Excel, PowerPoint and Word have each exactly one Ribbon. Outlook stands out from this pack though with 19 different Ribbons. It has a Ribbon for each particular item you can create/see in Outlook. So for example, there is a Ribbon for reading an email and there is a second one for writing an email.

Enclosed in the red rectangle above, is a tab. In this case the Home tab of Word. I marked a group, the Font group, with a yellow rectangle. Below, you see the core tabs of Word highlighted. There are also referred to as just tabs. Core tabs distinguish themselves from other tabs in that they are not linked to a particular object type. Instead, core tabs are either always visible, only visible in certain views or linked to a certain document type. For example in Word, the “Print Preview” tab and the “Blog Post” tab are core tabs, even though they are only visible under certain circumstances.

The other type of tab is a contextual tab. A contextual tab is only visible when a particular associated object type is selected in the Office application. In the screenshot below, you can see some contextual tabs. Those appeared, because I inserted a picture in a table and then selected the picture. Terminology-wise, “Picture Tools” and “Table Tools” are contextual
tab sets, or just tab sets, while the individual tabs that are shown below them are contextual tabs. Contextual tab sets only exist for object types pre-defined by Microsoft and it is not possible to create your own ones. However, the tabs contained in a tab set are fair game.

The Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) is another important piece of the new Ribbon UI. It can be in two positions, either in the titlebar of the window as shown next

Or below the ribbon

The last piece of terminology is related to the Office button menu, or short the Office menu. When you click on the button, you should see something that looks like the next screenshot. The left half shows you the menu, whereas the right half is the so-called flyout. If nothing in the menu part is selected or if something without an arrow next to is selected, the flyout will contain the most recently used document list. If something with an arrow is selected as shown below, the sub-menu for that menu point appears as flyout. There are two types of menu items with arrows in the Office menu. “Print” is a split button, as clicking “Print” directly triggers an action, but it has an arrow to bring out a sub-menu. In contrast, “Prepare” is just a menu button, because it only opens a sub-menu in the flyout.

So much from me on the Ribbon UI. If you had expected a discussion of why this new UI or of the central design tenants, you will have to wait till some later date.