How to Enable Tabbed Ribbon Interface in LibreOffice

Missing the good old ribbon interface of Microsoft Office in LibreOffice? You can get it in LibreOffice as well. Here's how to do that.
Warp Terminal

The ribbon interface in Microsoft Office is a sweet spot for many users. The tabbed ribbon interface groups specific options inside a single tab.

Ribbon interface in Microsoft Office
Ribbon interface in Microsoft Office

It is so popular that almost every Microsoft application has it.

Missing the good old ribbon interface of Microsoft Office in LibreOffice?

You can achieve similar results in LibreOffice which looks even better (in my opinion):

Ribbon interface in LibreOffice
Ribbon interface in LibreOffice

So let's jump to the how-to part!

Enable tabbed ribbon interface in LibreOffice

You'll have to activate experimental features to enable the tabbed ribbon interface in LibreOffice.

Open LibreOffice from your system menu:

LibreOffice in Ubuntu

Once you open it, click on Tools and select options from there, select advanced options and under optional features, you will find an option to enable experimental features:

Enable experimental features in libreoffice

Now, it will ask whether you want to restart LibreOffice now or later. Restart LibreOffice and it will enable experimental features for you:

restart libreoffice to enable experiemental features

Using the tabbed ribbon interface

Open LibreOffice writer or other tools from your system menu:

open LibreOffice Writer in Linux

Click on the View menu and select User Interface & select the Tabbed option and apply changes:

Enable ribbon tabbed view in LibreOffice

And here's the final result:

enable tabbed ribbon view on libreoffice

That was cool. If you don't like the tabbed interface, you can go back to the default view.

Revert to the default view in LibreOffice

The issue in reverting to the default view is there is no user interface option in the tabbed view.

So the first step is to enable the menu bar.

The option to enable menubar is situated inside the View tab:

enable menubar in tabbed ribbon view in libreoffice

Once you enable the menu bar, click on the View menu and select the User interface option. From there, select the Standard Toolbar option and apply the changes:

Switch to default user interface in LibreOffice

And it will get you the default look of LibreOffice:

The default look of LibreOffice

Yep, it's that simple to switch between user interfaces on LibreOffice!

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What's Next?

If you are using LibreOffice and want to get the most out of it, we have a dedicated video tutorial for that matter:

I hope you will find this quick tip helpful. Please let me know in the comments if you have any queries or suggestions!

About the author
Sagar Sharma

Sagar Sharma

A software engineer who loves to write about his experience with Linux. While reviving my crashed system, you can find me reading literature, manga, or watering my plants.

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