Windows shortcuts in Excel on a Mac, and in Word and PowerPoint.

RibbonKeys is a menu-bar app that brings the Alt-key ribbon shortcuts of Excel for Windows to Excel, Word and PowerPoint for Mac. One licence covers all three. It is for people who learned the ribbon on Windows and miss its key tips: tap ⌥, the letters appear over the ribbon, and in Excel H B A draws all borders without the mouse. It is free for 7 days, then €3.99 a month or €59.99 once.

How it works

1. Tap ⌥

   Tap the Option key by itself while Excel, Word or PowerPoint is in front, or hold it down with the first letter. Every tab gets a letter. The pictures are Excel, Word and PowerPoint: each has its own tab letters.

   

2. Type the tab's letter

   H opens Home, and every control on it gets its letters: the same ones as on Windows. A letter you have typed turns faint, and the letters it rules out are dimmed. The picture is Excel's Home tab.

   

3. Type on

   The last letter presses the button. If the button opens a dropdown, its items get letters too, and so does every submenu below it. Esc steps back one level.

   

A few sequences

Excel

• ⌥ H 1 Bold
• ⌥ H B A All borders
• ⌥ E S Paste Special
• ⌥ H O I Auto-fit column width
• ⌥ H L H G Highlight cells greater than
• ⌥ A T Filter
• ⌥ W F F Freeze panes
• Ctrl U Underline, as on Windows

Word

• ⌥ R G Track Changes
• ⌥ S F Insert Footnote
• ⌥ N B Page Break
• ⌥ P M A Custom Margins

PowerPoint

• ⌥ S B Play from Start
• ⌥ H I D Duplicate Slide
• ⌥ H G A C Align to Centre
• ⌥ W M Slide Master

For excel mac windows shortcuts, Option stands in for Alt and the letters are the Windows ones. A one-page sheet of the Excel sequences people type is also a PDF, and there is one for Word and one for PowerPoint. Every letter is listed per app: Excel, Word and PowerPoint.

Guides

• Install and troubleshooting: the download, the Accessibility permission, the Option key, Excel versions, and what to check when it is still not working.
• The Alt key in Excel for Mac: Option is the Alt key, and what tapping it does.
• Alt HOI on a Mac: auto-fit column width, and the rest of the Format menu.
• Paste values in Excel for Mac: H V V, and the other items of the Paste dropdown.
• Paste Special in Excel for Mac: E S, and the letters of the dialog.
• Freeze panes in Excel for Mac: the top row, the first column, or both.
• Excel KeyTips on Mac: what Excel for Mac's own KeyTips do differently from Windows.
• Windows Excel shortcuts without Parallels: the letters drawn over Excel for Mac, with no virtual machine.
• How RibbonKeys compares with Accelerator Keys, MacCove, LightningXL, Excel's own shortcuts and Parallels.

What it covers

• Excel's standard tabs. Home, Insert, Page Layout, Formulas, Data, Review, View and Developer, with their dropdowns and submenus.
• The tabs Excel adds for what is selected. Table, Chart Design and Format, Pivot Table Analyse and Design, Shape Format, Picture Format, SmartArt Design and Format, Header & Footer, Sparkline, Timeline, Slicer and Equation.
• Beside Excel's ribbon. The menu keys of Excel 2003, the Quick Access Toolbar by number, and the controls of dialogs. Word and PowerPoint do not get the menu keys or the dialog letters.
• Word. Home H, Insert N, Design G, Layout P, References S, Mailings M, Review R and View W, with the commands on those tabs and the menus they open. The tabs Word adds for what is selected, such as those for a table or a picture, get no letters. How it works in Word.
• PowerPoint. Home H, Insert N, Design G, Transitions K, Animations A, Slide Show S, Record P, Review R and View W, with the commands on those tabs and the menus they open, including Arrange then Align. The tabs PowerPoint adds for what is selected, such as those for a shape or a picture, get no letters. How it works in PowerPoint.
• Ctrl shortcuts. Excel for Mac takes most Windows Ctrl combinations as they are. Ctrl U is one it does not, so RibbonKeys makes it underline in Excel; a switch in its menu turns that off.
• Greyed-out commands. In all three apps a command that is greyed out has no letter, and gets it once it can be used.
• Not tested yet. Excel's Draw and Automate tabs have their letters, but need a Microsoft 365 subscription to be tried, and that has not been done.

Galleries and colour swatches are left to the arrow keys, as on Windows.

With and without RibbonKeys

• Excel for Mac's own shortcuts. Excel for Mac has shortcuts with ⌘. They differ from the Windows ones and reach only part of the ribbon; the rest is the mouse.
• Excel for Mac's own KeyTips. Since 2024 Excel for Mac can show letters over its ribbon itself. They are switched off by default; you switch them on in Excel's settings, under Accessibility. As Microsoft introduced them, some sequences differ from Windows, the items of a dropdown are chosen with the arrow keys, Esc ends the whole sequence, and holding ⌥ with a letter types a symbol. If they do what you need, you do not need RibbonKeys.
• Word and PowerPoint for Mac. On Windows, Alt puts a letter on every tab and button of their ribbons. Word and PowerPoint for Mac have no such letters.
• With RibbonKeys. The Windows letters throughout, also on the items of dropdowns and their submenus. Esc steps back one level, ⌥ can be held with the first letter, and in Excel the menu keys of Excel 2003 work, such as E S for Paste Special. Its limits: it costs money after the trial, and it needs the Accessibility permission.

Price

Try it free for 7 days. The trial starts when you first open RibbonKeys and asks for nothing. After that, choose one:

Both prices include VAT.

The comparison sets these prices next to those of Accelerator Keys, MacCove, LightningXL, Excel's own shortcuts and running Windows Excel in Parallels.

You buy from inside the app, under Settings… in its menu-bar menu, on the Licence tab. Payment happens on a checkout page in your browser, hosted by RevenueCat and completed in Stripe Checkout, sold through Link. Stripe processes the payment and issues the invoice. A business can enter its VAT number at checkout and receive an invoice. The terms of sale say how cancelling and the right of withdrawal work, and the questions page says where your invoices are.

Monthly and Lifetime are for one Mac. For a company with 5 Macs or more there are team licences, from €45 to €69 a seat a year before VAT.

Team licences

A team licence is a yearly licence per Mac seat, for a company that wants RibbonKeys on several Macs, with Excel, Word and PowerPoint on each. It starts at 5 seats, and every Mac that uses it takes one. The price a seat depends on the size of the team and applies to every seat: 30 seats are 30 × €55.

What a team licence gives that single licences do not: one licence code for every Mac, a yearly invoice from Stripe for all the seats, and a team page that lists the Macs holding a seat. A manager frees a seat there, without the Mac at hand, and another Mac takes it; a single licence is taken over from a Mac that still holds it at most twice in twelve months, unless that Mac is removed from it first. The licence can have a second manager, and the number of seats can be changed.

Team prices are before VAT. Stripe adds the VAT at checkout, from the company's billing address and VAT number.

A manager signs in on the team page with a Microsoft or Google account, chooses the number of seats and pays in Stripe Checkout. The team page then shows the licence code. Each Mac enters it with the Enter Licence Code… button on its Licence tab. The team page also has the invoices and the seats: which Macs hold one, adding seats, removing seats and releasing a seat. Team codes need RibbonKeys 0.3.3 or later. Rolling out RibbonKeys to a team goes through it step by step. The terms of sale and the privacy page cover team licences.

Privacy

RibbonKeys needs the Accessibility permission of macOS. This is what it does with it and what it sends. The privacy page has all of it: what is kept about a purchase and about the managers of a team licence, who else handles it and for how long.

• Your files stay on your Mac. RibbonKeys does not read the cells of a sheet or the text of a document or slide, and nothing about your files is sent anywhere.
• Keys. While it runs, macOS passes key presses and mouse clicks to RibbonKeys; that is how it notices the tap on ⌥. It acts on them only in Excel, Word and PowerPoint: on the tap on ⌥, or ⌥ held with a letter, that starts a sequence, and on the letters and Escape of the sequence, which it keeps from the app; in Excel on Ctrl+U outside a sequence, which it hands on as Command+U so that it underlines, unless that is switched off in its menu; and on an Escape that closes a dropdown a sequence left open, after which it puts the keyboard back in the document. Every other key goes to the app untouched. It does not record them and does not send them.
• The ribbon, the menus and dialogs. It reads the names and positions of the ribbon's tabs, buttons and menu items, and in Excel also of the menu bar and of dialog controls, to know where to draw the letters and what to press. Along the way it sees the titles of the windows, which include the file's name, and in Excel the text in the boxes of an open dialog. It keeps none of this and sends none of it.
• What it sends. Its licence code: to check that it has been paid for, and once a day to say that it is in use. A copy that has a licence, bought or given free, also sends with the licence code a code that stands for your Mac and the name of your Mac, when it is opened, about once a day and when its licence changes, so that a licence is in use on one Mac at a time; the same two codes go with entering a licence code, removing the Mac from the licence and asking where the subscription is managed. When it looks for an update, it sends the version you have. When you choose Send Feedback… in its menu and press Send, it sends the message you wrote, your e-mail address if you typed one and, if you left it ticked, the versions of RibbonKeys, macOS and Office, which the window shows as they are sent; a copy that has a licence adds the code that stands for your Mac, never the licence code. Unless that is switched off in its settings, it also tells the same service when it starts, once per local calendar day at its first hourly check while open (from version 0.3.10), and how it ended: quit, closed by the Mac shutting down, restarting or logging out, or ended badly, as after a crash; each of these anonymous usage events carries only a random id made for this alone and the version of RibbonKeys. From version 0.3.11, once a day on which you used the letters is over, it also sends how often that day a letter sequence ran a command, in Excel, in Word and in PowerPoint, and how often a Windows Ctrl combination was handed on to Excel, with the day: counts alone, never which keys, commands or files, and nothing for a day on which you did not use them. If you quit it yourself while the trial runs, it asks once what made you quit; an answer goes only if you choose one and press Send and Quit.
• Nothing else. No tracking, in the app or on this site, and no analytics beyond counts of downloads and updates, by country, by the site the link was on and by an optional channel tag in the link, and the app's anonymous usage events, which can be switched off. When you choose Send Feedback… in its menu and press Send, it sends the message you wrote to the same service, with your e-mail address if you typed one and, if you left it ticked, the versions of RibbonKeys, macOS and Office, which the window shows as they are sent; a copy that has a licence adds the code that stands for the Mac, never the licence code. Using RibbonKeys needs no account. Nothing is sold.

To see what is held about you, or to have it corrected or deleted, write to [email protected].

Support

Installing it, the Accessibility permission, the Option key and a sequence that does nothing are on the page Install and troubleshooting.

A question, a sequence that does not work, or a lost licence code: write to [email protected]. It helps to say which versions of macOS and of Excel, Word or PowerPoint you have.

Free for 7 days, with no account and no card. After that €3.99 a month or €59.99 once, including VAT.
For a company with 5 Macs or more there are team licences.
Needs macOS 13 or later, and Excel, Word or PowerPoint for Mac.