The Ribbon that you see within the
PowerPoint 2019 for Windows user interface was designed to make
all options easily accessible. To make more options available on the Ribbon, you can add more tabs, rename them, and populate
them with even more commands, as we will explore within this tutorial.
All buttons on the Ribbon are placed within separate Tabs, and each Tab
has groups with a few commands each. We explained these basics in our
Ribbon and Tabs tutorial. Customization of the
Ribbon involves four areas:
- Adding and Renaming Ribbon Tabs. We cover this topic on this page. Other techniques are covered
in these separate, linked tutorials:
- Reordering and Removing
Ribbon Tabs
- Working with Custom Groups in Ribbon
Tabs
- Adding Commands to Custom
Groups
Follow these steps to learn more:
- To add or rename Ribbon tabs, you need to bring up the
PowerPoint Options dialog box. There are two
ways to access these options. The easier way is to right-click anywhere on the Ribbon, and 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 to be selected
- Alternatively, choose the File menu to bring up
Backstage view, as shown in
Figure 2. Now, select Options (highlighted in green 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
- Since you want to create a new tab, click on the New Tab button (highlighted in
red within Figure 3, above). This will add the New Tab (Custom)
within the Main Tabs list, as shown highlighted in red within
Figure 4, below.
-

Figure 4: New custom tab added
- Note that when the New Tab (Custom) is added, a default
New Group (Custom) is also added. This is because all commands you add within a Ribbon tab need to reside
in a group.
- You should now rename your custom tab. Select the newly added New Tab (Custom), and click
the Rename button (highlighted in blue within Figure 4, above).
This brings up the Rename window, as shown in Figure 5. Provide a name, and click the
OK button.
-

Figure 5: Rename the new tab
- You can rename the New Group (Custom) option the same way you did for
New Tab (Custom). The only difference is that the Rename window lets you choose a symbol
for your group, as shown in Figure 6. We explain more about customizing groups in our
Working with Custom Groups in Ribbon Tabs
tutorial.
-

Figure 6: Custom group Rename window
- When done, click the OK button within the PowerPoint Options dialog box
to get back to PowerPoint interface.
Figure 7, below shows the new custom tab within the Ribbon with the default custom group
-

Figure 7: New custom tab with custom group added to the Ribbon
- Save your presentation often.