Many Office commands display a dialog box, which is simply a way of getting more information from you. For example, if you choose Review?Changes?Protect Sheet from Excel’s Ribbon, Excel can’t carry out the
command until it finds out from you what parts of the sheet you want to protect. Therefore, it displays the Protect Sheet dialog box, shown in Figure 2-26.

The Excel dialog boxes vary in how they work. Some of them show the result of your actions immediately. For example, if you’re applying formatting to a chart, changes you make in the Format dialog box are shown immediately. Generally speaking, if a dialog box has an OK button, then it must be dismissed before anything happens. If the dialog box has a Close button, then it shows the result of your actions while the dialog box remains open.

When a dialog box appears, you make your choices by manipulating the controls. When you’re finished, click the OK button (or the Close button) to continue. If you change your mind, click the Cancel button (or press Esc), and nothing further happens.

Most people find working with dialog boxes to be quite straightforward and natural. If you’ve used other programs, you’ll feel right at home. The controls can be manipulated either with your mouse or directly from the keyboard.

Navigating dialog boxes
Navigating dialog boxes is generally very easy—you simply click the control you wish to activate.

Although dialog boxes were designed with mouse users in mind, you can also use the keyboard. Every dialog box control has text associated with it, and this text always has one underlined letter (a hot key or accelerator key). You can access the control from the keyboard by pressing the Alt key and then the underlined letter.

You also can use Tab to cycle through all the controls on a dialog box. Shift+Tab cycles through the controls in reverse order.

Using tabbed dialog boxes
Many of the dialog boxes are “tabbed” dialog boxes. A tabbed dialog box includes notebook-like tabs, each of which is associated with a different panel.

When you click a tab, the dialog box changes to display a new panel containing a new set of controls. The Format Cells dialog box in Excel is a good example. This dialog box is shown in Figure 2-27; it has six tabs,
which makes it functionally equivalent to six different dialog boxes.

Tabbed dialog boxes are quite convenient because you can make several changes in a single dialog box. After you make all of your setting changes, click OK or press Enter.

Office 2007 introduced a new style of tabbed dialog box in which the tabs are on the left, rather than across the top. An example from Excel is shown in Figure 2-28. To select a tab using the keyboard, use the up and down arrow keys, then press Enter.

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