The traditional menus and toolbars have been replaced by the Ribbon, which shows relevant commands for a given action rather than every command at once. This allows you much more area on your screen to view models and the other panel areas that are described in the following sections. The pertinent tools for the current task are provided to you, collected in Groups. The Ribbon Menu bar is permanently located across the top portion of the program window. This style of menu will be familiar to users of Microsoft Office 2007, but is easy to learn for any user. Just think of the Ribbon tabs as visual menus.

In the main Ribbon, you will see a series of tabs which access sets of commands grouped by the relevant task. The Home ribbon tab contains a set of most frequently used commands. There are more tabs which appear just to the right of the Home ribbon tab which display collected features when clicked. This way, most of STAAD Foundation Advanced's functionality is brought to the top level, reducing the number of mouse clicks and hunting around for specific features. Frequently used commands may also be added to the Quick Access Toolbar to customize the interface.