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?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Install, redeem, activate | For home | Other

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-11-05T17:02:23+00:00

    aw... none of my pictures made it...

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-11-23T17:00:00+00:00

    I am having the same issue.  Our IT support team replaced my Dell 5590 with a 5570.  It's the only change and now my ribbon is way too large on all MS Office applications.  I suspect the support specialist may not be experiencing the same issue due to using a different model computer than the inquirer.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-12-03T12:15:43+00:00

    Wow, thank you very much David Wilkinson, this helps!!!

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-12-03T15:24:31+00:00

    Wow, thank you very much David Wilkinson, this helps!!!

    This is great!   Thanks for sharing it!  No one from my IT support team, Dell or Microsoft was able to resolve it for me.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-12-14T16:38:21+00:00

    I think I've found a solution if you haven't already.

    I just did this on my computer and it worked.

    Here's what I did:

    1. Right click on the Windows icon in the taskbar.
    2. Click on Device Manager.

    1. I uninstalled both display adaptors from my PC deleting its driver softwares for it.

    Part 1:

    Part 2:

    1. I rebooted my PC. And voilà!

    It fixed my problem.

    What happened:

    I like my icons and ribbon small, so when it rebooted, my display resolution was 1920x1080 and the scale size was 125%. As you can see on the image below:

    After that I put at 100% into my linking and my Ribbon was the way it was supposed to be!

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