1 How to Show the Ribbon in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook2 How to Customize the Ribbon in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or Outlook3 How to Customize Ribbon Tab Groups in Microsoft Office4 How to Customize Group Commands in the Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, or Word Ribbon

What is the ribbon in Word? Before we show you how to use the Office ribbon editor to achieve this customization, let’s quickly cover what the ribbon is, how it works, and why you might want to change things up. To put it simply, the Microsoft Word ribbon is a UI element at the top of your document that provides access to most of its tools, which Microsoft calls “Commands”. For ease of use, there are ribbon tabs, which break up these commands into different sections, and groups within that. All other Office components such as Excel and PowerPoint and most of many modern Windows Applications use a ribbon interface.

However, while these default categories clearly made sense to the designer, they may not make sense to you. For example, the “Review” tab doesn’t contain a button to mark a document up with digital ink. With a few clicks, you can use the Office ribbon editor to adjust which tabs show, or even create your own tab with the tools you use most. As you can imagine, this can have quite a positive effect on productivity. First, though, let’s cover how to show the ribbon in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or Outlook in case you’ve hit that pesky auto-hide button.

How to Show the Ribbon in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook

How to Customize the Ribbon in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or Outlook

How to Customize Ribbon Tab Groups in Microsoft Office

How to Customize Group Commands in the Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, or Word Ribbon

That brings this lengthy tutorial to a close. You should now know everything you know about the MS Word ribbon, including how to show it, create new tabs, and modify items within those tabs. You can repeat these steps to customize the ribbon of any Office application for a more bespoke experience. However, there’s more you can do yet to customize your Office install. Why not check our guides on how to enable dark mode for the suite or change background color in Word?

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