Ribbon Hero Teaches Office In A Playful Way

There are two types of Office users: Those who know everything – or nearly everything – about the program and those that do not. The latter group usually has to look really hard, consult an online help, book or colleague if they have to do something in Microsoft Office that they have not done before at all or only scarcely in the past.

Ribbon Hero is an add-on for Microsoft Office that can be used to learn new features of Microsoft Office in a playful way. The Microsoft Office add-on offers two modes. The first mode is basically showing a score that can increase or decrease depending on the user’s command of the Office program. Formatting text for instance will raise the score.

That alone is an interesting feature but not the core of what Ribbon Hero is about. The Office add-on comes with challenges which are small tasks that it asks the Office user to complete. It displays a document to the user and asks the user to edit that document in a certain way, e.g. changing the orientation of it to landscape mode.

Many Office users might feel helpless at this point but help is directly available on the same page in Office meaning that every step of the process of editing the document is explained to the user, if necessary.

Every completed step is visualized to the user who receives a congratulations message upon finishing the task. Ribbon Hero uses an achievement page, like one used in many computer games, to show the overall progress to the user. New tasks can be selected from that screen to increase the tasks that have already been completed.

Ribbon Hero is being offered for Office 2007 and Office 2010 users who run a 32-bit or 64-bit edition of Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7 or a 32-bit edition of Windows XP. The Office add-on is only offered in English currently and integrates itself into Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday March 10, 2010 -
Tags:learn office, microsoft-office, office 2007, office 2007 add-on, office 2010, office 2010 add-on, ribbon hero