Are you a Ribbon Hero? Check out this Ribbon Game in Office 2007 and Office 2010

As my last blog post was on Office Web App’s I said I would keep up the charge on how Office is starting to become cool! Let me introduce you to Ribbon Hero for Office Word, PowerPoint and Excel 2007/2010.

What is it?!

At its heart, Ribbon Hero is a game built inside office. You compete to win points, which are awarded to you by doing certain actions with Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Office has so many features and shortcuts that make working faster which many people who  use Office daily didn’t actually know about. The Ribbon Hero game focuses on this, improving your skill and knowledge in these powerful but underused features of Office. It also adds a social aspect to it, while completing the Ribbon Hero challenges and earning points, you can be competing with your friends and networks on Facebook.

So how do you play Ribbon Hero?? In two ways, firstly you can just use the App’s, as you start using basic commands, like bold, italic, and underline, you’ll start earning a small number of points.  
As you use more complex features, like Styles or Style Sets, or combinations of features, you’ll earn even more points.  When you download the add-in you will see the icon (on the left) in the Ribbon. This is the number of points you have scored so far.

The second way is to play the challenges which ribbon hero has, as we can see in the screenshot, the first challenge for word is working with text. I’ve currently zero points so I better get moving! Another thin you might see in the picture is my friends Ribbon Hero score from Facebook. You can click on it and compare what they have completed with what you have completed.

I’ve been playing around with it for a while now and I have to say it’s really cool and I’ve actually learned about some cool features that I never know office had! Check out the video and then give it a try for yourselves!

Get Ribbon Hero now - https://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero
Office 2010 Beta - https://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx

Ribbon Hero – Introduction

About the author:

Darren is a Microsoft Student Partner in the Institute of Technology, Carlow, Ireland.
You can contact Darren at Darren.doyle@student-partners.com or on Twitter @darrendoyle