The ribbon can help you quickly find the commands that you have to have to complete a task. Commands are organized in logical groups that are collected together under tabs. In earlier versions of Office for Mac, many of these commands were located on the Formatting Palette.
Tabs
Ribbon
Do any of the following:
 | Minimize the ribbon while you are working |
To see more of the document, you can minimize the ribbon so that only the tabs appear.
 | Expand the ribbon while you are working |
 | See more selections in scrolling galleries |
On the ribbon, you can view several thumbnails of styles, themes, or other formats, or you can expand the list to see them all. Some expanded lists have additional menu items at the bottom. To see an example, follow these steps.
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On the Home tab, under Styles, click the right arrow
to scroll through the styles.
-
To expand the list to see all the styles, point to a style, and then click
.
 | Use the format tabs |
When you insert shapes, charts, pictures, movies, or other objects, additional tabs appear that you can use to format these objects. For example, if you insert a shape, the Format tab appears next to the Home tab. To see an example of how this works, follow these steps.
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On the Home tab, under Insert, click Shape.

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On the pop-up menu, rest the pointer on Rectangles, and then click the rectangle style that you want.
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In your document, point where you want to insert the shape, hold down the mouse button, and then drag the pointer until the shape is the size that you want.
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Click the shape, and then click the Format tab.
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Use the buttons, pop-up menus, and galleries to apply formatting to the shape.
 | Resize the document window to see more or fewer items on the ribbon |
As the document window becomes smaller, the number of items that can be shown on the ribbon also changes. For example, the number of thumbnails that appear decreases or a scrolling gallery changes into a button. To see how this works, follow these steps.
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On the Home tab, under Styles, count how many style thumbnails show.

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Resize the window to make it smaller.
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On the Home tab, under Styles, the number of style thumbnails decreases.
 | Turn off the ribbon |
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On the right side of the ribbon, click
, and then click Ribbon Preferences.
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Under General, clear the Turn on the ribbon check box.