How Can I Reduce Size of Ribbon Icons & Text in Office 365 / 2016?

Anonymous
2019-09-26T00:38:24+00:00

Since MS Office was updated earlier in 2019 (for me) I have had this stupidly sized ribbon that takes up about double the screen area compared to previous iterations of Office.  I want to reduce it, so do many other people it seems but there seems to be no satisfactory method.

Before answering, please read the following;

  1. I do not want to HIDE the ribbon, I just want the icons / text to be smaller.
  2. I know about the MOUSE / TOUCH setting.  It is already on Mouse and the ribbon is still far too big.
  3. Monitor resolution is 1920 x 1080 on my laptop and secondary screen, there is no option to change monitors.
  4. Text size in the OS is currently set to the recommended 125%  I do not want to change this as I do not want to upset any of my other (many) applications.
  5. This is only a problem caused by the update in MS Office, no other apps are affected.

Will someone at Microsoft please explain how to reduce the childish looking icons and text in the MS Office Suite so that I can recover screen space?

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  1. Anonymous
    2019-11-06T15:02:53+00:00

    I have the Same issue that Paul has carefully described.  In previous versions of the Office they have an icon feature setting that made them smaller.  I think this would address the what Paul and I are having trouble with on this Office upgrade.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-12-02T14:22:09+00:00

    Paul,

    I have had the same problem and could not find a setting to change it.

    I run multiple monitors.  I have found that if I move the application with the offending large ribbon size to another monitor, it becomes reasonably sized.  What see a bit crazy is that when I move it back to the original monitor, it retains the reasonably sized ribbon. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-12-19T15:03:11+00:00

    I have the same problem. I have to scale my monitor to 125% to make a certain piece of software usable, but it makes the Ribbon much too large. Please patch asap Microsoft. Scaling has been around for about 20 years and it continues to be a major challenge for Windows and Office. Baffling.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-01-24T18:31:10+00:00

    I has this issue after switching laptops and when I changed the Touch/Mouse mode to Mouse rather than Touch it was sorted!

    Pete

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-03-17T05:25:28+00:00

    New features and functionality at the expense of what the end user working on. Another user interface fail by the team at Microsoft. If you are going to "add functionality" then why don't you provide an option to reduce the size of the icons etc. My automatically updated Outlook 2016 has now become "outlook 365" and permanently turned into vision impaired mode. Instructions on how to roll back the update would be appreciated

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