The main menu of your application in the ribbon is divided into three areas.  On the left you can have buttons for significant operations, such as a file menu in a document-centric application.  On the right, you can have either more buttons for additional commands or you might use it as a most recently used list as shown here.  On the bottom of the application menu there is a place to display buttons for high-level commands such as exiting the application.

You can expose galleries of gallery items to your users, where each gallery item might be a pictoral representation of something your user might want to do. Applying a style to some text in a word processing application is one example, and the ribbon facilitates this by helping the user instantly identify the visual style they want to apply.  Extensive eventing even makes it possible for your application to react to the user's interest in one of the gallery items by repainting the document showing a live preview of what the change might look like when applied.

Users can configure the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) to place it above or below the ribbon window, or to dynamically add and remove tools and ribbon groups.

If you have ever used tabs and panels in an application before, you will quickly recognize the ribbon's object model.  You can work with a collection of tabs, and within each tab a collection of groups, and within each group a collection of tools (usually related to the function of the group).  This allows you to organize tools so they can be easily discovered by your users.

In addition to supplied themes that allow the ribbon to appear like Office 2007 Silver, Office 2007 Blue or Office 2007 Black, you can design your own styles and employ its resource washer capability to finely affect the ribbon's appearance so it melds into your application's overall consistent appearance or can be displayed according to your users preferences.