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
    2021-04-25T11:19:55+00:00

    Having just acquired a new (Microsoft!) laptop I now have the enormous new ribbon. It is at least 1cm deeper than on my previous laptop (which I suppose has not been updated recently). To put it another way, the ribbon took up 22% of the depth of my old screen, and now it's 30%. In Excel this equates to the loos of 3 or 4 rows. It's intolerable. So much empty space at the top of the screen! Can I revert to the older version of Office?

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-03-08T14:26:16+00:00

    Thank you jaymee_marie! This worked! Thank you for posting the answer.

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  3. 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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  4. 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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  5. Anonymous
    2020-08-21T05:43:20+00:00

    Exactly the same - it solves the problem - bizarre but problem solved.

    Thanks all.

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