How to reset Microsoft Office Ribbon Customizations to default?

Microsoft Office has now been around for years as one of the most widely used office suites. Packaging tools of the highest quality in it, like Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, has come to the resort of millions of professionals. But it’s not just this wide array of apps that has popularized it; it’s all that these apps offer which is unique and all the customizations they present you with to suit your own convenience.

Ribbon Customizations are one of them, a key one, as a matter of fact. Given how wide the scope of customizing an app’s interface is using the ribbon settings, one may sometimes want to go back to the initial settings and start afresh. In this article, I will demonstrate how to customize Microsoft Office Ribbon in just a few easy steps.

What are Ribbon settings in Microsoft Office?

In the terms of a computing interface, Ribbon is a graphical control element present in apps in the form of tabbed toolbars. Generally, a Ribbon consists of large toolbars with graphics settings categorized based on functionality. Different tabs are used to offer different customizations, with similar and aligned settings grouped together for the user’s convenience. It is the tabbed toolbars that you use in Office apps like MS Word that come under the purview of Microsoft Office’s Ribbon, toolbars with settings to enhance and professionalize a user’s work.

Reset Ribbon Customizations in Office to default

For the purposes of this article, we’ll be demonstrating the reset option for Ribbon settings in Microsoft Word, but rest assured, the steps to follow would be analogously parallel in the other Office apps too. In order to do so, follow the steps below:

Launch the Microsoft Word application on your computer.
On the top-right, you’ll find the ‘File’ option, clicking on which will take you to a different page.
Here, among the options in the list on the screen’s left-hand side, you will find a setting dubbed as ‘Options’. Click on it.

This will open a dialog box of the name ‘Word Options,’ and this where you can customize nearly everything that Microsoft Word has to offer.
Select ‘Customize Ribbon’ which will then open the window of all the settings and modifications that come under the feature. You can customize the Ribbon by adding or deleting commands from it, but that’s not what we are concerned with today.

On the bottom of the dialog box is a drop-down option ‘Reset,’ clicking on which will give you the option to ‘Reset all customizations’.

Click on it and confirm the final warning to take all Ribbon settings back to square one.

Read: How to reset Word to default settings

How to reset particular Ribbon tabs in Office apps?

In case you want to reset any particular Ribbon setting, the procedure is, more or less, similar.

Follow the first few steps as mentioned above till you get to the Word Options dialog box.
Here, go to Customize Ribbon, and from the list of settings already in your Ribbon package, deselect the ones you don’t want to reset.

Click on ‘Reset’ and further choose ‘Reset only selected Ribbon tabs’. Confirm the setting and the work is done!

Alternatively, you may want to completely revamp your existing Ribbon settings but not go back to the initial setup. In such a case, Microsoft Office also gives you an option to import Ribbon settings from a different setup.

This can be done by clicking on the ‘Import/Export’ setting right below the ‘Reset’ option, which will subsequently option a window of your computer’s File Manager, from where you can select the settings file you want to import. The procedure to export a file is the same.

Hope this helps.