How to Customize the Ribbon in Microsoft Excel 2016

During this Microsoft Excel 2016 training tutorial video, you will learn to familiarize yourself with the Ribbon including its different tabs, commands and controls. We will show you how commands become enabled/disabled, how to hide/unhide the Ribbon, how to use key tips and how to customize the Ribbon.

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Video Transcript

In this section I’m going to cover the use of the Ribbon in some detail. If you’ve used a relatively recent version of Excel before you may be pretty familiar with the Ribbon and you may well not need to go through this section at all. If on the other hand you haven’t used the Ribbon before or you’ve used a much older version of Excel, maybe one of the early versions that used the Ribbon, or you want to find out about Key Tips or Auto-Hiding the Ribbon then I suggest you go through this section because I’m going to try to cover it fairly thoroughly to give you all of the basic things you need to know to get the best out of using the Ribbon.

The Ribbon is this rectangular area here. And above the rectangular area there are individual words or phrases and these correspond to the Tabs. The Ribbon is actually made up of a number of Tabs. Now you can’t see all the Tabs here at the moment. Some of them are only shown under certain circumstances. And you can in fact add your own Tabs. But the ones you see here are the basic default Tabs. A couple of exceptions. On the left the word File there as you know gives you access to Backstage View. Technically it’s not really a Ribbon Tab at all. And on the right we have the new Tell Me feature. So in fact the Ribbon I’ve got here has seven tabs: Home, Insert, Page Layout, Formulas, Data, Review, View. If you see a different list to that all will be revealed later to explain why that is.

Now one thing to notice straightaway is that Home is highlighted. We say that the Home Tab is selected. But on the Ribbon you see a lot of grayed out controls. Most of those are various types of command. They’re ways of doing certain things to your Excel workbooks. But on the Home Tab they are currently all grayed out. And the reason they’re grayed out is that you couldn’t actually use any of them at the moment. And the reason you can’t use them at the moment is because I don’t have a workbook open.

Now let me open one of the recently opened workbooks. So let me go into Backstage View. Let’s try Demo 1 again. And you see that the controls on the Home Tab on the Ribbon are no longer grayed out. You could actually use those commands. And in fact if I click on a couple of the other tabs, let’s look at the Insert Tab, they are not grayed out either. Let’s go to Page Layout, Formulas. Now when you get to Formulas there are one or two, there’s one there, a command that’s still grayed out. Now the fact that that’s grayed out means that I couldn’t do whatever it does at the moment with my current situation.

So let’s go back to the Home Tab then and let’s see what we can do. Let’s suppose I type in the currently selected cell the word Hello. Now having typed Hello if I click on the Enter tick there next to the Formula Bar now I’m going to go up to the B command here, the one that I’ve currently got selected, Bold. I’m going to click that and it makes the text in that cell bold.

Now the commands on each tab of the Ribbon are divided into groups and the groups are separated by these tiny little thing vertical lines. So on the Home Tab you have a Clipboard Group, a Font Group, note the names at the bottom of the groups, an Alignment Group, a Number Group, and so on. On the Insert Tab you have a Tables Group, an Illustrations Group, an Add-Ins Group, and so on. And within each Group you have individual Controls. So for instance on the Page Layout Tab in the Themes Group you have a Themes button, a Colors button, a Fonts button, and an Effects button. So you have a structure to the Ribbon. You have the Ribbon, you have the Tabs, you have the Groups, you have the Controls.

So let’s look now at some of the other aspects of these Controls. There are very many different types and if you take, for example, the one on the left of the Home Tab, the Paste button, it’s actually a two part button. Many of them are two part buttons. I’ve currently got the cursor over the top half of the button and you notice the Screen Tip there, Paste. Control-plus-V is the keyboard shortcut. And then there’s that Screen Tip description. We talked about these earlier in the course. Add Content on the Clipboard to your document.

Now the lower half of the same button, with the arrow, is actually a dropdown which gives us a selection of Paste options. And this selection will be dependent on the exact situation that you’re in. So depending on what you’re Pasting into and what you’ve got on the Clipboard you’ll get a selection of options there.

Now some of the other buttons like this Cut button here, for example, is straightforward, simple button. To the right in the Font Group we have a Font selection dropdown list here. So if I click on the arrow I have a list of all the fonts available on my device that I can use. And to the right of that I have a list of available sizes. Now sometimes as with this Font Size list although you have a number of available sizes, so as you can see here 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14. If I selected 12 that’s fine but I can actually type in a size as well. So I could type in 13 if I wanted 13 point. So you’re not necessarily limited to the sizes in the actual button.

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So the Controls correspond to various types of commands. Some of them are simple click buttons. There’s dropdowns, there’s split buttons and so on. And during the course we’ll be looking at these many different types of Control and Command.

Now if you take the Font Group here, for example, there are quite a few commands in there that enable you to, for instance, make text bold or italicize it underline it. And as you’ve already seen you can change the font you use and the font size and so on. So you have a whole selection of buttons and options. But in the bottom right hand corner of the Font Group there is a tiny little button that’s called a Dialogue Box Launcher. And if I click on the Dialogue Box Launcher, that’s that one there, it brings up a conventional type of dialogue. It’s a Format Cells Dialogue and the Font Page within that dialogue is selected. So if rather than use all of those individual buttons you want to use a dialogue like this one, as I say a much more conventional type of Control in Excel, you can certainly do that. And many people, including me, sometimes prefer to bring up a dialogue and make a whole load of settings at once. And then obviously once I’ve made all my selections I click OK to activate them or if I changed my mind, I want to start again, I can use the Cancel button to cancel.

Note the question mark there which will normally take me through to online Help on the particular dialogue, possibly the selected page that I’m using at that time.

Sometimes, let me just cancel this. Sometimes if you go to a regular command like this one, Conditional Formatting, you get a dropdown list of possible options. If I go to say Manage Rules here I get a dialogue that enables me to manage my Conditional Formatting rules. So there are many situations in which dialogues appear and they in turn will have many options and are sometimes a better option or a more convenient option than using the individual commands on the Ribbon.

Let me just close that one.

Let’s move on to some of the ways of using the Ribbon that you may not be familiar with even if you’ve used it before.

The Ribbon takes up quite a bit of space and quite often when you’re working in Office programs in general, Excel in particular, space is at a premium and you may want or need to use some of the space that’s occupied by the Ribbon. One of the complaints that’s often made about the Ribbon is that it takes too much space on the screen. The top right hand corner of the Excel window there is a button. It’s Ribbon Display Options. And if you click on Ribbon Display Options there are three. There’s Auto-Hide, Show Tabs and Show Tabs and Commands. And by default Show Tabs and Commands is selected. That’s basically seeing all of the detail of the Ribbon.

If I switch to Show Tabs watch what happens. The Ribbon itself is no longer visible and all I can see is the Tabs. Now you may think that’s going to be a little bit problematic because you think, “Well how the heck do I find all of the commands that I need?” You’d normally use this option when you’re already fairly familiar with where everything is on the Ribbon. And you don’t need to be able to see the Ribbon to find the things that you want.

So for example, let’s suppose I wanted to make the word Hello in I10 Italic. I know it’s on the Home Tab in the Font Group. So all I need to do is to click the Home Tab and then as if by magic the Ribbon appears. I find the command I want, in this case the Italic command. Watch what happens when I click on Italic. That’s italicized. I could underline as well if I wanted to, do anything else I want to it. And as soon as I finish what I’m doing the Ribbon disappears again and gives me that space back.

Now if at any time I want to switch back to the Ribbon being shown all the time I choose the third option.
Now an even more extreme option is Auto-Hide Ribbon and this hides the Ribbon and the Tabs. Now you may think it’s actually quite difficult to do anything at all without being able to even see the Tabs but in fact all you need to do is to click up here at the very top and the Tabs and the Ribbon itself will reappear for you to do something.

So let’s say switch off the underlining here and switch off the Italic again and then as soon as I’ve finished the Ribbon is hidden once I’ve completed the operations I am performing there. You might use this option, for example, if all you want to do is to enter some data into the cells in a workbook or to use features whereby you don’t need the Ribbon at all. Believe me it will happen from time to time. And then at whatever point you finish with that it’s very straightforward to go back to one of the other settings because you still have up here the Ribbon Display Options button. You can click on that and you could, for example, go straight back to showing Tabs and Commands again.

Now let me look at a couple of other useful features of the Ribbon. I’ve already mentioned going into Touch Mode if you’re using a touch device. Don’t forget the button there that lets you switch between Mouse Mode and Touch Mode. And of course in Touch Mode everything is spaced out more for your fingers.

And another very useful feature, particularly for people with certain types of disability but in many cases for people who prefer to use a keyboard to using a mouse there is a very useful feature that’s known as using Key Tips. Now if you want to operate the Ribbon and its Commands using the keyboard rather than the mouse the problem you have is knowing what all of the keyboard shortcuts and key sequences are.

Now if you press the Alt key, just press it and release it, you are given a set of single key stroke ways of accessing the Tabs on the Ribbon. In fact if you look above those you’ll also see some numbered keys for the Quick Access Toolbar. We’re going to be looking at the Quick Access Toolbar in the next section.

But let’s suppose I now want to go to the Page Layout Tab. I don’t want to use the mouse. All I need to do is to press the P key on the keyboard. That not only takes me to the Page Layout Tab but it also gives me a set of single and double key combinations that enable me to operate the Commands on this Tab. So if for example I wanted to check or change the orientation of the pages here if I press the O key it actually operates the Orientation key and then I can choose using the up and down arrows whether I want my pages to be Portrait or Landscape Orientation.

And when you’ve finished using this particular feature if the Key Tips are still visible you can just press the Alt key to hide them again.

In the early stages of using Excel 2016 the Tabs that you see there and the Commands on those Tabs are probably going to be plenty for the kinds of things that you’re going to be doing. But there are other Tabs, as I mentioned before, and in fact you can even create your own Tab and put your own Groups and Commands on it.

Now we’re not going to go into this customization of the Ribbon here but I am going to talk about customization in relation to the Quick Access Toolbar in the next section. And on the basis of that you may want to try to experiment with a little bit of customization. Let me just show you where that happens.

If you click on the File Tab to go into Backstage View and go into Options one of the pages there is Customize Ribbon. And from there not only can you customize the Ribbon from the point of view of adding your own Tabs and so on but you can also, for example, make some Tabs visible or invisible. So for at the moment if you look at these checkboxes down here the Developer Tab is not shown. If I check that now you’d also see a Developer Tab.

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So that’s all of the basics about the Ribbon for now. One thing I haven’t gone into is the new Tell Me feature and I’m going to cover that in a couple of sections from now. Although it’s on the Ribbon it works in a subtly different way really to the rest of the Ribbon. And as it’s a new feature I’ve set aside a separate short section for that.

So that’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!