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Word 2007 — Minimizing the Ribbon & Gettting It Back!

One of the Love It Or Hate It features of Office 2007 is the new Ribbon Bar interface.

If you're like me, you can find new features by accident. in this case, I found that I can accidentally wipe out the ribbon so that it doesn't show all the time.

It's actually an intentional function in Word 2007 to give us more visible document space when we want it. All we need to do to see the ribbon again is to click on one of the tab headings (well, when the ribbon is minimized, it looks just like a menu bar to me).

Minimizing the ribbon intentionally is easy. All you need to do is to click on the option pulldown to the right of Word's quick toolbar, just to the right of the Office button (that's the official name of the ugly new Office logo). The bottom item in the pulldown menu is Minimize the Ribbon. Click on it to hide the Ribbon interface, as shown below.

Restoring the Ribbon to full view is equally as easy. When the Ribbon is minimized, click on the option pulldown by the Word quick toolbar. Now, you'll see that Minimize the Ribbon is checked. Click on it to uncheck the option and return the toolbar to view.

That's not how I accidentally triggered the minimization, though.

The other way to minimize the toolbar is to double-click on the active toolbar tab (if another tab is currently selected, the first click will switch tabs — and then it takes a double-click to minimize the Ribbon).

That's what I did. I accidentally double-clicked on the currently selected tab on the Ribbon.

Poof! The Ribbon was gone.

Fortunately, Word's Help function bailed me out. A quick search in it gave me the answer I needed. Since we no longer have the old standard Windows menu bar, we can't find Help under the About menu bar item any more. That's ok, it's a question-mark icon right below the top bar of the window on the right-hand side.

Not only has Word's Help functions improved dramatically over the years, the Help functions in the other Office programs and in non-Microsoft programs have improved, too. It has become much easier to find answers in the Help functions.

Copyright © 2009 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.