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Installed Office 2013 on Windows 8 today. It's great, except for one thing, the all caps ribbon titles are inconsistent with the title case titles everywhere else in Windows 8. Is there a registry setting that will let me change this?

consistency

Nanne
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Kirk Ouimet
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6 Answers6

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Of course, it can be fixed. Simply put a space before or after the Tab title. I prefer putting it after.

  • Right click the tab heading > Customize the ribbon > Click on the tab you want to rename. Either right click and select "Rename" or click the "Rename" button below.

  • Then put a space before or after the tab title.

  • The tab title will now appear in sentence case.

slhck
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Hadron
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  • I've undeleted this, but it would be nice to [edit] your answer to include all the steps necessary to do this. If your answer doesn't appear to actually answer the question, you should probably expand it and make it more descriptive. – slhck Oct 30 '12 at 08:11
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    Albeit a clunky workaround, this works, and now they're nice again *subjective!* All but "File" – David Cumps Jan 27 '13 at 22:39
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    This doesn't work for me. When I click to rename it doesn't respond. – Yuck Jan 28 '13 at 16:50
  • See [Zonder's answer](http://superuser.com/a/521561/986) for a link to his batch file that automates the process of modifying the menu names in all the Office applications. Quite a time saver. – raven Mar 16 '13 at 16:29
  • I have the same problem as Yuck - right-click, Rename, nothing happens; same if you use the Rename button below. However, Zonder's download worked great. – GeoffM Jun 28 '13 at 20:18
  • THis is the best answer. no download, scripts or anything :) – Nanne Jul 23 '13 at 07:56
  • @Yuck did you append *space* after name as is written in this response? – DiGi Jan 10 '14 at 15:36
  • Up vote this answer given that @Zonder solution is no longer viable (download not available). – lordhog Nov 23 '16 at 03:15
19

No, apparently, there isn't. Here is what seems to be an official answer from Microsoft (thread):

The development team discussed changing the tabs to proper case, but made a firm decision that they would leave them all caps as designed. There is no way to change them in the registry, but if you have an add-in that creates new tabs, they will be whatever case you specify in your custom ribbon file.

There is a registry setting to disable all caps menu in the Visual Studio 2012 (discussed here, for example):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General
DWORD: SuppressUppercaseConversion
Value: 1

But this does not work for the new Office 2013. Just in case I have tried these settings (of course, none of them worked):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\SuppressUppercaseConversion
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\General \SuppressUppercaseConversion

If you need more information on this choice, here is a good thread at ux.stackexchange.com, where you can find a designer's opinion on that.

Community
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Vladimir Sinenko
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    On that SE thread I found the following quote from MS: "We've chosen to use uppercase styling in the top menu for two main reasons: 1) to keep Visual Studio consistent with the direction of other Microsoft user experiences". *Really*? What the beep's up with the Win8 UI then if they wanted to maintain visual consistency? – Karan Oct 27 '12 at 23:00
  • Microsoft made a lot of changes in Windows 8. They wouldn't want to risk loosing market share by pushing all the planned changes at once. – Rakib Ansary Oct 27 '12 at 23:06
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    Microsoft has never kept Office or their other apps consistent with the OS. They tend to be a testbed for UI ideas. – Alan Shutko Oct 27 '12 at 23:30
  • if we can't get rid of the caps, can we change the font to something that doesn't look so caps-y? – peterchen Feb 06 '13 at 16:48
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    This answer is incorrect; there is, in fact, a workaround to this horrible design: http://superuser.com/a/495227/6714 – Tullo_x86 Feb 14 '13 at 00:44
  • @Tullo: [This answer](http://superuser.com/a/521561/986) is even better. – raven Mar 16 '13 at 16:31
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    The funny/moronic part is that Windows 8, despite its flaws, didn't go around capitalizing assorted parts of the UI for zero benefit. (The caps don't convey any info, they just make it look worse. The beta of Office2013 even had the mailbox name in all caps - at least they backed off on that one.) – MichaelGG Mar 18 '14 at 08:11
6

You can also try unOFFIC (http://unoffic.migeel.sk/). It's a small in-memory patch for all Office 2013 apps that fixes ALL CAPS not only on the ribbon, but also in the status bar and a few other spots. It doesn't modify the Office EXEs in any way, so it should be pretty safe and update resilient.

Michal Strehovský
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The all-caps is a software feature. The new release of Visual Studio 2012 uses all-caps as well. Microsoft is probably testing if users accept this new look. Depending on how things turn out, they'll probably release a patch (service packs) to either change all-caps to normal (Office, Visual Studio, etc) or normal to all-caps (File Explorer, etc).

enter image description here

Rakib Ansary
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4

right click on the tab title, choose customize ribbon, click rename and put a blank space in front of the tab title. Click OK. Do the same for all the other titles.

Ayhan
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4

A Microsoft MVP has complete menu customization files available for download, here:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/wiki/office_2013_release-office_install/proper-case-for-office-2013-ribbon-menus/d28ad27b-a727-4b63-a6e1-46deb15696a8

These can be safely imported into Office 2013 apps through the "Import/Export" feature in the ribbon customization menus, and they will proper-case the entire menu.

Paul Smith
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