For many, including myself because I don't use it that much and I don't really care, MS Office is the benchmark in the field of office suites. Microsoft's offering has been displayed in tabs for a long time, but LibreOffice, its main competitor, still uses a classic menu by default (see image below). Can they be made more similar? If they're not expected to be two peas in a pod, then yes.
La ribbon, Notebook bar The LibreOffice ribbon isn't new. It's been available since February 2017, coinciding with version 5.3, but it's worth remembering that it exists. While everyone may have their own preferences, what we're going to explain is the quick and easy process for putting menus into tabs. Anyone looking for something like this and not knowing how to do it will surely think, "Is it that easy?" Let's get to it.
Put LibreOffice on tabs
What you need to do is very simple. We'll start by opening Writer itself, going to the "View" menu, and then clicking "User Interface...".
This will take us to the user interface options, and the next step is to click on “Tabbed.”
Finally, we need to select "Apply to all" if we want the ribbon to appear in all the apps in the office suite, or "Apply to Writer" if we only want it in Writer. The second option will appear with the name of another app if launched from another app, such as "Apply to Calc" if launched from Calc.
And that would be all.
For your information, below we also have the options for single bar, sidebar, compact tabbed, compact grouped, and simple contextual. These options are variants of the two main options, which are with a menu or tabbed.
What do we gain from this change?
From my point of view, it's clearer. The normal menu is fine, but the tabs are much more descriptive, as the image shows:
Some might think not, but it helps. When you don't quite know where what you're looking for is, it helps a lot to see the icons.
And with this simple change, LibreOffice will look a little more like MS Office.