Excel's ribbon, by keyboard, on the Mac.

On Windows you press Alt and type letters to reach any button on the ribbon. RibbonKeys brings that to the Mac: tap ⌥, the letters appear over the ribbon, and H B A draws all borders without the mouse.

Free for 7 days, with no account and no card. After that €3.99 a month or €39.99 once.
Needs macOS 13 or later and Excel for Mac set to English (United Kingdom).

How it works

1. Tap ⌥

   Tap the Option key by itself while Excel is in front, or hold it down with the first letter. Every tab gets a letter.

   

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.

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

• ⌥ H 1 Bold
• ⌥ H B A All borders
• ⌥ E S Paste Special
• ⌥ H O I Auto-fit column width
• ⌥ A T Filter
• ⌥ W F F Freeze panes

RibbonKeys covers the seven standard tabs with their dropdowns and submenus, the tabs Excel adds for a table, a chart, a pivot table, a shape or a picture, the menu keys of Excel 2003, the Quick Access Toolbar and the controls of dialogs. Galleries and colour swatches are left to the arrow keys, as on Windows.

Price

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

You buy from inside the app, under Licence… in its menu-bar menu. Payment happens on a checkout page in your browser. The terms of sale say how cancelling and refunds work.

Privacy

Last updated 4 October 2026

RibbonKeys needs the Accessibility permission of macOS. This is everything it does with it, and everything it sends.

• Your workbooks stay on your Mac. RibbonKeys does not read the cells of your sheets, and nothing about your workbooks 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 and only during a letter sequence. It does not record them and does not send them.
• The ribbon, the menus and dialogs. It reads the names and positions of Excel's tabs, buttons, menu items and dialog controls, to know where to draw the letters and what to press. Along the way it sees the titles of Excel's windows, which include the workbook's name, and the text in the boxes of an open dialog. It keeps none of this and sends none of it.
• Licence check. About once an hour it asks RevenueCat, the service that handles the purchase, whether its licence code has been paid for. The code is made from your Mac's hardware identifier in a way that cannot be turned back; the identifier itself is not sent.
• Update check. About once an hour it fetches one small file from this site, which holds the number of the newest version.
• Payment. You pay in your browser on a checkout page run by RevenueCat with Stripe. Your e-mail address and payment details go to them, not to the app. They keep the record of your purchase: your e-mail address, what you bought and when, and the licence code. The seller can see that record, and uses it to answer you and for the bookkeeping the law requires.
• This site. It sets no cookies and loads nothing from other sites. It is served through Cloudflare, which sees your IP address when you load a page, as any web server does.
• Nothing else. No accounts, no analytics and no tracking, in the app or on this site. Nothing is sold or shared.

To see what is held about you, or to have it corrected or deleted, write to [email protected]. If this policy changes, the date above changes with it.

Support

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 Excel you have.