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The Spellbook (Hotkey: P; called "Spellbook & Abilities" in the button tooltip on the Micro Menu) contains a list of all the various spells, abilities, and professions you have learned while playing, as well as mounts and companions you've collected.

Lower tabs

Spellbook

The Spellbook tab contains right-side tabs for General abilities (Auto-attack, shoot, racial traits, and passive abilities) and your particular class's three talent trees, which contain the spells and abilities found on your action bars. Each ability or spell icon can be dragged onto an action bar. A Paladin, for example, would have a right-side General tab, then Holy, Retribution, and Protection tabs as well.

Professions

Shows a status bar for each primary and secondary profession as well as profession-related subskills. Icons for opening profession window or activating a subskill are shown and can be dragged onto an action bar.

Mounts

Shows a preview of currently selected mount with icons for summoning spells for available mounts. Spell icons can be dragged onto an action bar.

Companions

Shows a preview of currently selected companion (non-combat pet) with icons for summoning spells for available companions. Spell icons can be dragged onto an action bar.

In Mists of Pandaria

This section concerns content exclusive to Mists of Pandaria.

This section concerns content that is not yet released.

In Mists of Pandaria, the abilities portion of the spell book will be totally re-vamped again with a more generalized selection divided between Passive and Active tabs.^[1]

#5 - [Feedback] New Spell Book | 2012-04-13 14:51 | Ghostcrawler

To clarify, the new spellbook has 4 tabs (5 if you have a pet or are a druid).

The first tab is general, and contains riding, armor skills, languages and guild perks. The second tab is your current spec tab. It contains all of the spells -- class and spec, active and passive -- that apply to your character.

The other 2-3 tabs are for other specs. They contain all of the spells (class and spec) that those specs can use. If you want to know if e.g. both Holy and Shadow have Power Word: Shield, you can look on those tabs.

We are currently still sorting spells within a tab by active and then passive, but we may merge them back together if the active vs. passive thing proves confusing.

This design is different from the spellbook on live, which classified every spell as belonging to a spec. This made some sense for say mages, whose spells tend to all have fire, frost or arcane theming, but didn't work well for many other classes. Sinister Strike is on the Combat tab, but Eviscerate is on the Assassination tab. Garrote is Assassination, but Sap is Subtlety. Super intuitive, huh?

We understand that putting lots of spells on one tab is overwhelming, but arbitrarily dividing spells onto multiple pages is confusing. There's no clear win either way.

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Pre- Cataclysm UI

Spell and Ability Pages

Each class had its own set of three tabs, each corresponding to a talent tree, where spells and abilities of a corresponding type are found. The highest rank of a spell was always shown, unless "Show all spell ranks" box is checked on the top of the page. This was useful to Mages, if they are supplying a lower level player with water or food so they can select the appropriate level food/water for who they are assisting.