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Select the Office tab. Note: If you don't see this tab, and you're using Office with a work or school account, the setting might be controlled by your IT admin. To stop using Office to sync Office files, clear the Use Office applications to sync Office files that I open check box.
A File tab may refer to any of the following: 1. In Microsoft Word and other Microsoft Office products, the File tab is a section on the Office Ribbon that gives you access to file functions. For example, from the File tab, you can access the Open, Save, Close, Properties, and Recent file options. The image below is of Microsoft Word 2010.

The 'Microsoft 365' tab gives you easy access to your most-recently-used Office cloud files (both SharePoint and OneDrive), your SharePoint sites, and the top Office Online apps. There are additional tabs that show Office documents that have been shared with you, and documents that might be of interest to you. TAB makes critical information easy to store, find and use, helping you optimize business processes, reduce risk, and save time and money. Learn more about our business and office storage and filing systems. Core Office mobile apps include: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote. Limited to devices with integrated screens 10.1” diagonally or less. E1 includes Office for Web and mobile apps only. Office mobile limited to devices with integrated screens 10.1” diagonally or less”.

A contextual tab is a hidden tab control in the Office ribbon that is displayed in the tab row when a specified event occurs in the Office document. For example, the Table Design tab that appears on the Excel ribbon when a table is selected. You can include custom contextual tabs in your Office Add-in and specify when they are visible or hidden, by creating event handlers that change the visibility. (However, custom contextual tabs do not respond to focus changes.)

Note

This article assumes that you are familiar with the following documentation. Please review it if you haven't worked with Add-in Commands (custom menu items and ribbon buttons) recently.

Important

Custom contextual tabs are currently only supported on Excel and only on these platforms and builds:

Excel on Windows (Microsoft 365 subscription only): Version 2102 (Build 13801.20294) or later.
Excel on the web

Note

Custom contextual tabs work only on platforms that support the following requirement sets. For more about requirement sets and how to work with them, see Specify Office applications and API requirements.

You can use the runtime checks in your code to test whether the user's host and platform combination supports these requirement sets as described in Specify Office applications and API requirements. (The technique of specifying the requirement sets in the manifest, which is also described in that article, does not currently work for RibbonApi 1.2.) Alternatively, you can implement an alternate UI experience when custom contextual tabs are not supported.

Behavior of custom contextual tabs

The user experience for custom contextual tabs follows the pattern of built-in Office contextual tabs. The following are the basic principles for the placement custom contextual tabs:

When a custom contextual tab is visible, it appears on the right end of the ribbon.
If one or more built-in contextual tabs and one or more custom contextual tabs from add-ins are visible at the same time, the custom contextual tabs are always to the right of all of the built-in contextual tabs.
If your add-in has more than one contextual tab and there are contexts in which more than one is visible, they appear in the order in which they are defined in your add-in. (The direction is the same direction as the Office language; that is, is left-to-right in left-to-right languages, but right-to-left in right-to-left languages.) See Define the groups and controls that appear on the tab for details about how you define them.
If more than one add-in has a contextual tab that is visible in a specific context, then they appear in the order in which the add-ins were launched.
Custom contextual tabs, unlike custom core tabs, are not added permanently to the Office application's ribbon. They are present only in Office documents on which your add-in is running.

Major steps for including a contextual tab in an add-in

The following are the major steps for including a custom contextual tab in an add-in:

Configure the add-in to use a shared runtime.
Define the tab and the groups and controls that appear on it.
Register the contextual tab with Office.
Specify the circumstances when the tab will be visible.

Configure the add-in to use a shared runtime

Adding custom contextual tabs requires your add-in to use the shared runtime. For more information, see Configure an add-in to use a shared runtime.

Define the groups and controls that appear on the tab

Unlike custom core tabs, which are defined with XML in the manifest, custom contextual tabs are defined at runtime with a JSON blob. Your code parses the blob into a JavaScript object, and then passes the object to the Office.ribbon.requestCreateControls method. Custom contextual tabs are only present in documents on which your add-in is currently running. This is different from custom core tabs which are added to the Office application ribbon when the add-in is installed and remain present when another document is opened. Also, the requestCreateControls method can be run only once in a session of your add-in. If it is called again, an error is thrown.

Note

The structure of the JSON blob's properties and subproperties (and the key names) is roughly parallel to the structure of the CustomTab element and its descendant elements in the manifest XML.

We'll construct an example of a contextual tabs JSON blob step-by-step. The full schema for the contextual tab JSON is at dynamic-ribbon.schema.json. If you are working in Visual Studio Code, you can use this file to get IntelliSense and to validate your JSON. For more information, see Editing JSON with Visual Studio Code - JSON schemas and settings.

Begin by creating a JSON string with two array properties named actions and tabs. The actions array is a specification of all the functions that can be executed by controls on the contextual tab. The tabs array defines one or more contextual tabs, up to a maximum of 20.
This simple example of a contextual tab will have only a single button and, thus, only a single action. Add the following as the only member of the actions array. About this markup, note:
- The id and type properties are mandatory.
- The value of type can be either 'ExecuteFunction' or 'ShowTaskpane'.
- The functionName property is only used when the value of type is ExecuteFunction. It is the name of a function defined in the FunctionFile. For more information about the FunctionFile, see Basic concepts for Add-in Commands.
- In a later step, you will map this action to a button on the contextual tab.
Add the following as the only member of the tabs array. About this markup, note:
- The id property is required. Use a brief, descriptive ID that is unique among all contextual tabs in your add-in.
- The label property is required. It is a user-friendly string to serve as the label of the contextual tab.
- The groups property is required. It defines the groups of controls that will appear on the tab. It must have at least one member and no more than 20. (There are also limits on the number of controls that you can have on a custom contextual tab and that will also constrain how many groups that you have. See the next step for more information.)
Note
The tab object can also have an optional visible property that specifies whether the tab is visible immediately when the add-in starts up. Since contextual tabs are normally hidden until a user event triggers their visibility (such as the user selecting an entity of some type in the document), the visible property defaults to false when not present. In a later section, we show how to set the property to true in response to an event.
In the simple ongoing example, the contextual tab has only a single group. Add the following as the only member of the groups array. About this markup, note:
- All the properties are required.
- The id property must be unique among all the groups in the tab. Use a brief, descriptive ID.
- The label is a user-

Office Tab