Ribbon UI

In computer interface design, a ribbon is a graphical control element in the form of a set of toolbars placed on several tabs. In 2007 Microsoft products began to introduce a form of modular ribbon as their main interface where large, tabbed toolbars, filled with graphical buttons and other graphical control elements, are grouped by functionality. Such ribbons use tabs to expose different sets of controls, eliminating the need for numerous parallel toolbars. Contextual tabs are tabs that appear only when the user needs them. For instance, in a word processor, an image-related tab may appear when the user selects an image in a document, allowing the user to interact with that image.

The usage of the term ribbon dates from the 1980s and was originally used as a synonym for what is now more commonly known as a (non-tabbed) toolbar. However, in 2007, Microsoft Office 2007 used the term to refer to its own implementation of tabbed toolbars bearing heterogeneous controls, which Microsoft calls "The Fluent UI". Thus, Microsoft popularized the term with a new meaning, although similar tabbed layouts of controls had existed in previous software from other vendors. The new design was intended to alleviate the problem of users not finding or knowing of the existence of available features in the Office suite.

Use of a ribbon interface dates from the early 1990s in productivity software such as Microsoft Word and WordStar as an alternative term for toolbar: It was defined as a portion of a graphical user interface consisting of a horizontal row of graphical control elements (e.g., including heterogeneously-sized buttons and drop-down lists bearing icons), typically user-configurable.

A toolbar interface, called the "ribbon", has been a feature of Microsoft Word from the early DOS-based Word 5.5 (ca. 1990) and the first Windows-based versions (activated by the "View | Ribbon" menu option), for which early advertising referred to the use of "the Ribbon to replace an endless string of commands to let you format characters by eye instead of memory".

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