Word 2013 Ribbon Disappears

A plethora of tutorials to get you up to speed with Microsoft Word 2013

Disappearing Ribbon

The ribbon is the horizontal area that appears at the top of the workspace and that holds all document related commands. Or at least, you would expect to see it there. Some users of Word 2013, however, have had the misfortune to lose their ribbon.

If you are one of those unlucky souls, you’ll understand how frustrating it is to work on your document (assuming that you don’t know the keyboard shortcut for every command).

To explain how to bring it back, first of all let’s look at how to get rid of it. You should be able to see an icon that looks like an up arrow at the bottom right of the ribbon.

Collapse The Ribbon

If you hover over it, you’ll see the tooltip “Collapse the Ribbon” appear. The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + F1. When you collapse the ribbon, it disappears and only the tabs remain. This is a good way to get more space to display your document. When you need to use a command, you can click on a tab to display all the commands on it. When you return the cursor to the document, however, the ribbon disappears again – and this is what fools a lot of people.

Look No Ribbon

How To Display The Ribbon

There are two ways to get the ribbon back permanently. The first is to click on a tab to display its commands. At the bottom right of the ribbon you will see the Pin the Ribbon icon.

Pin The Ribbon

Click that to keep the ribbon displayed. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + F1 to display the ribbon. Ctrl + F1 uses the least number of mouse movements / keyboard presses, so that’s the method we prefer!