Project Professional and the Disappearing Format Tab in the Ribbon

BY: Collin Quiring

The way the ribbon works is that the format tab will automatically appear based upon the view that you are in at the time.  And, the options that the ribbon contains at that point are based upon the view so that you have options that are appropriate to the view.  This “always” works.

I was working in Project Professional 2013 and wanted to change the formatting in the view that I was in.  The problem was immediately obvious to me, the format tab was not appearing in the ribbon.  But, it is “always” there.  I tried other views and for a few of them, it appeared, for others it did not.  I closed out of Professional and re-opened it (I was not connected to a server so it was purely a local client issue).  I even rebooted my computer, but no difference.

Since I had been working in Professional the whole time and since I hadn’t done anything special I know for a fact that I did NOT do anything to make this stop happening.  However, I have used computers long enough to know that the “impossible” happens quite often.

Project Professional 2013 is new and there may be some sort of bug or it may have been something on my computer in the background (again, it was NOT something that I did) or it could have been anything happening that I don’t know about.  I am not sure about how it happened, just that it did.

So, the key item – how did I get it fixed?  Well, with the help of Project MVP Julie Sheets we discovered that a few of my format tabs had been turned off!  How, we don’t know.  But, the fix was to turn them back on and the world was a happy place again.

How do you turn them on?  Go to File — > Options — > Customize Ribbon and then go to Customize the Ribbon on the left hand side and select the Tools selection from the drop down or select the All Tabs option.  Then, scroll down until you find the Tools option and the Format option.  Select the checkbox next to each Format option.  This is what was randomly turned off on a number of mine.

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