There's a design failure here, and it deserves a straightforward name: the Excel Ribbon customization dialog has a resize problem that shouldn't exist in 2024. A user running Windows 11 Home and Excel 2024 opens the dialog to tailor their workflow, and the dropdown that lists every available tab displays only one name at a time. Scrolling through a single-line list to find "Add-ins" or "Developer" is not customization, it's a scavenger hunt. And the user already tried the reasonable fixes: adjusted screen resolution and scaling. Neither worked. That's not a feature limitation. That's a UI that forgot it serves humans.
What this means for you is practical and frustrating. If you want to reorganize your Ribbon to match how you actually work, pull your most-used commands into a custom tab, hide the ones you never touch, you're forced to navigate a dialog box that fights you. The dropdown window is too small to show more than one tab name clearly. You can't drag to resize it. You can't adjust the system DPI to trick it into behaving. The dialog simply refuses to scale with your screen, your resolution, or your patience. The workaround is to memorize the alphabetical order of tab names and guess which one you're selecting, or click through one by one. Neither is a solution for a professional tool.
We think Microsoft should fix this, and we think users deserve better than a workaround. The Ribbon is one of Excel's most powerful personalization features, it's how you turn a generic spreadsheet into your own efficient workspace. Blocking that with a UI that shows one item at a time is like handing someone a set of keys and telling them they can only try one lock per minute. The user in this case did the right thing: they checked their OS version, their Excel build, their display settings. They documented the issue clearly. The problem is on Excel's side, not theirs.
So here's the concrete point: if you're stuck in that dialog, your best immediate move is to use keyboard navigation, Tab into the dropdown, then use the Up and Down arrows to move through the list more quickly than a mouse click. It's not a fix, but it's faster. And if you're looking for a tool that respects your time and your screen real estate, it's worth exploring alternatives that treat customization as a native feature, not an afterthought.