In all Office programs you can give your own interpretation to the working environment. You can add your own tabs and edit or delete existing ones. This makes the famous ribbon more in line with your personal way of working. Here we explain how adjusting menus in Word works.
The ribbon of Become consists of tabs containing groups in which you can see different assignments together. It is not possible to change the size of the ribbon or the size of the icons on the ribbon. You can, however, change the order of the tabs and indicate which tabs, groups and assignments you do and do not want to see.
Before you read on, it’s good to know that you can always restore the ribbon to its default layout. You do this via Adjustments, Reset, Reset all adjustments.
To change the ribbon go to File to Options. There is the button on the left Customize ribbon. This window is divided into Choose assignments and Customize the ribbon.
Customize ribbon
Let’s start with the right side. By clicking the plus sign in front of the name of the main tab, you will see the groups. If you then click on the plus sign in front of the group, you will recognize all assignments that are in such a group.
In this window you can also change the order of the main tabs. You click on such a main tab and drag it higher or lower in the ranking. You logically add a new tab with the button New tab. There are users who create an extra tab in this way, for example, to manage their macros, or to keep certain shapes or icons at hand.
At first the newcomer appears as an untitled tab, but you can give this tab a meaningful name via the right mouse button. Tabs and groups that you add or edit can be recognized by the label (custom) that appears after the name.
Extra groups/assignments
A new (still empty) group is immediately added to the new tab, which you have to fill with assignments. After all, a tab without commands is meaningless. You can also give the empty group a name via the right mouse button. Then you add the commands to each group by selecting items from the left column and then in the middle on the button Add to click.
In this example, we’ll create a Favorites tab, in which we’ll add the Illustrations group. Afterwards, the ribbon will look like this:
In the Illustrations group we then place assignments such as Graphics, Graphics, SmartArt and so on. To quickly get to the desired assignments in the left column, you can choose among others above Popular quests, All quests and Assignments not on the ribbon. The latter is an interesting one because it brings you to a series of commands that were never accessible via the ribbon before.
With the options it is also possible to hide tabs and groups that you never use. To do this, uncheck the item. This makes the work environment clearer. Now that you know your way around, you can quickly reveal those hidden items again.
You can’t hide commands in the main tabs, but you can do them with the button remove do take away.
Quick access (to Address Book, for example)
To access certain functions that you often need more quickly, there is the toolbar Quick access. This is the narrow blue horizontal bar above the ribbon. You probably already have the button here Auto save. This toolbar is also customizable; you can easily add buttons for certain commands.
Click in that bar on the button with the arrow pointing down and then on the button Customize Quick Application Toolbar. Here are functions that you can simply check. This will add buttons in this bar, such as New, Open, Save and Fast printing.
One command in Quick Access that will be useful to many users is the function directory. This allows you to directly enter the contact information that Outlook stores in your Word documents. How do you do that? Select the button More assignments. This will open the window Word options, this time go to the section Quick Access Toolbar.
At first you see in the left column Popular assignments, but there you will not find what you need now. Change this setting to All assignments, so that you get an alphabetically ordered list of all the commands that are available. Select the command from this long list directory and then use the button Add. Confirm with OK to close this window.
You will then see that the Address Book icon has been added to the top of the toolbar. Now when you place the mouse pointer in the Word document and you click on this address book icon, you can select a name from the selected Outlook address book. The data that you can import in this way, of course, depends on the information you have entered for this contact.
The adjustments you make in the Word work environment are not transferred to the other Office programs. If you also want to see changes in the Word ribbon in PowerPoint or Excel, you have to apply them there separately.
In itself logical, because every Office program has many features that are not interchangeable with other programs in the package. If you want more Office tips, we would like to point you to these course Working with Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
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