Customizing Ribbons in Office 2013

With release of Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft has introduced a new feature called as Ribbon. Ribbon is nothing but the replacement of old age office toolbars. Ribbon provide a lot of tools for editing your document, presentations and spreadsheets. Since ribbon has replaced toolbars and menus, many people do found it confusing. People who are familiar with older versions of office are too confused while searching for a tool in ribbon. So here are steps to customize ribbon in Office 2013 so you can group your tools according to your own requirements.

Step 1: Enter in Customize the Ribbon menu

This is the place from where you can customize your ribbon. To enter, you have to right click on ribbon and then you have to select Customize the Ribbon from options.

Customize the Ribbon
Customize the Ribbon

Step 2: Create a new tab

On Office ribbon, there are tabs. Some of them are Home, Insert, Design etc. Office 2013 groups the functions in tabs. So once you entered in Customize the Ribbon option, you have to create a new tab to group your favorite controls. You can find the option to create a new tab from bottom of option window. Once you clicked on New Tab a new tab will appear in right hand column. Right click on that newly created tab and select Rename to rename that tab.

Creating Tab
Creating Tab

This is what you will see after creating and renaming new tab. Here I have renamed my new tab as ‘Ankur’s tab’.

Step 3: Add commands

In office 2013, you have to place command only in groups. By default when you create tab, a new group is created. Select the New Group from newly created tab. You can rename the group by right clicking on it. Once you are ready just select the commands from left pane and click on Add button. You can create another group by right clicking on tab name. Use the groups to group commands according to their usage. You can create a group say Editing, which contains all the command that you use for editing or you can create a group with name say Mail, which contains all the commands related to mail merge.

Adding Commands
Adding Commands

Once you are done with adding commands you can click on OK button and you will see the new tab on ribbon.

Customized Ribbon
Customized Ribbon

That’s all. Now you have learned to customize your office 2013 ribbon. Go ahead and customize them according to you. Be more productive.

Note: This ribbon customization is product specific. That means here you have customized the ribbon of Word 2013, hence you will not see this customization in PowerPoint 2013 or Excel 2013. So if you want to customize ribbon in Excel 2013 then you have to follow same steps in Excel 2013.

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