How to use an office suite’s ribbon without a mouse
Press Alt (or F10) and every ribbon tab shows a letter; press it, and every command shows one too. F6 moves between the ribbon, the document, the panes and the status bar, and the arrow keys move inside each. With those few keys, everything in the ribbon is reachable without a mouse.
15 October 2026 · 5 min read
Alt shows a letter for every command
In Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, pressing and letting go of Alt shows a small letter, called a KeyTip, on every ribbon tab: H for Home, N for Insert, and so on. Press one and the tab opens with a KeyTip on each of its commands. Press that, and the command runs or its menu opens. F10 does the same as Alt.
So Alt, H, then the letters for Bold or Center, works without any shortcut learnt in advance: the letters are on screen as you go. Escape steps back one level at a time.
The menu shortcuts of Office 2003 still work too. Typing Alt, E, S, the old Edit, Paste Special sequence, still opens Paste Special in today’s Excel, which helps anybody whose fingers learnt them years ago.
F6 moves between the parts of the window
A window has several areas: the ribbon, the document, any panes open beside it, and the status bar. F6 moves the focus from one to the next, and Shift+F6 goes back. It is the quickest way from the page to a pane, such as Navigation or Comments, and back again.
Inside an area, the arrow keys move between controls, Tab and Shift+Tab move between groups, and Enter or the space bar presses what has the focus. Shift+F10, or the menu key, opens the right-click menu for whatever is selected. Ctrl+F1 hides the ribbon or shows it again.
In other suites
- LibreOffice uses menus by default: F10 or Alt opens the menu bar, and the underlined letters work as access keys. F6 moves between the menu bar, the toolbars, the sidebar and the document.
- Google Docs and Sheets have no KeyTips, but Alt+/ opens a search of every menu command, which is often quicker: type a word of the command’s name and press Enter.
With a screen reader
Windows comes with Narrator (Ctrl+Windows+Enter starts and stops it), and NVDA is a free, widely used screen reader. Both read the ribbon as you move through it, so long as the program names its controls and tells the screen reader where the focus is.
That is where programs differ. Whether a program works with a screen reader comes down to two things: does every button say what it is, and does the program say where you are in the document, such as the cell you are in, the slide you are on or the heading you have reached. A program’s accessibility statement, if it publishes one, should say which of these it does and what it does not.
Our own product, disclosed
Where our own software comes into this
We make Rutba Office, a free desktop suite for Windows whose ribbons work the way this article describes. Alt or F10 shows KeyTips, with Office’s letters wherever Office has the same tab, and since version 2.1 F6 and Shift+F6 move between the ribbon, the panes, the document and the status bar. Menus follow the arrow keys, Home and End, and Escape returns the focus to whatever opened them.
Since 2.1 every app is checked at each release against WCAG 2.2 levels A and AA, and a screen reader is told a document’s headings, a worksheet’s active cell, a deck’s slide and the message open in Mail. Our accessibility statement says criterion by criterion what is met and what is not, and that people who use screen readers have not yet evaluated it.
Related
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Ten apps, one free download
No account, no telemetry, and it works with the network switched off.