If you want to really benefit from customizing your Ribbon in PowerPoint 2016, then
certainly want to add some commands that are not placed by default within any of the Ribbon tabs. You’ll notice that all commands are placed within Groups.
Whatever your intent may be, you cannot place any commands within the existing Groups that are built within PowerPoint. You first need to
add a custom Group within any of the tabs available in the
Ribbon. Thereafter, you need to populate them with commands.
Follow these steps to learn how to add commands to custom groups:
- You first need to bring up the PowerPoint Options dialog box.
There are several ways to access these options. The easiest way is to right-click anywhere on the Ribbon, and then to choose the Customize the Ribbon
option from the resultant menu, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 1.
Figure 1: Customize the Ribbon option
Alternatively, access the File menu and choose Options (highlighted in blue within
Figure 2).
Figure 2: Options within File menu
- Either way, this opens the PowerPoint Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 3. Make sure you choose the
Customize Ribbon option within the sidebar. This shows the relevant options on the right side of the
PowerPoint Options dialog box (see Figure 3 again).
Figure 3: PowerPoint Options dialog box
Now choose the custom Ribbon tab you have already added. This
should contains a new custom Group (highlighted in red within Figure 4, below). As
you can see, our custom group is bereft of any commands.
- To add commands within this custom group, make sure you select the custom group first, as shown highlighted in red
within Figure 4.
Figure 4: Custom group selected
- Next, choose any of the commands you want to add from within the Choose commands from list (shown highlighted in
blue within Figure 4, above). Once you select the command, just click the Add button
(highlighted in green within Figure 4, above).
Note: In
Figure 4 above, you can see that we chose the
Popular Commands category within in the
Choose commands from list. You can click the down-arrow within the commands selection area to bring up the
Choose commands from drop-down list to find out more command categories, as shown in
Figure 5.
Figure 5: List of other command categories
- This will add the selected command within the custom group, as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Command added within custom group
- Similarly, continue adding more commands. Figure 7 below shows more commands added to the custom group.
Figure 7: More commands added within custom group
- When done, click the OK button within the PowerPoint Options dialog box to get back to
PowerPoint interface. Figure 8, below
shows all the new commands added within the custom group.

Figure 8: Command within custom group
See Also:
Adding Commands to Custom Groups in PowerPoint 2013
for Windows
Adding Commands to Custom Groups in PowerPoint 2010
for Windows