LibreOffice gives its Ribbon-style UI a pop of colour

You’ll be able to customise the look of LibreOffice’s Tabbed UI in the free office suite’s next major release, which his due out in August 2026.

LibreOffice 26.8’s Tabbed UI (also known as the Notebookbar and modelled after the Ribbon in Microsoft Office) can show a colourful background when application theming is enabled under Tools > Options > Appearance.

A blue shade is used by default but you can pick or set any colour you like. In the ‘Customisations’ section, first selected the Writer, Calc, Impress or Data Notebookbar value, then use the dropdown to chance the colour. Click apply to see it in action.

You’ll also see your preferred coloured background when using the Tabbed Compact mode as well, albeit to less obvious effect given it’s more of a narrow strip.

Designers working on the suite shared the image (embedded further up this post) of the newly hue’d backdrops in situ under (based on the window decorations) KDE.

I tested a nightly snapshot of LibreOffice 26.8 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and the end result wasn’t as graceful owing to a thin wine line bordering the tabbed UI area:

Nightly builds show the refresh looked on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

But since LibreOffice 26.8 is in active development this (and other design) wrinkles are expected – there’s over 2 months of development and refinement still to come.

LibreOffice’s Tabbed UI mode is not enabled by default. If you find the standard toolbar humdrum but LibreOffice’s other theming and customisation options don’t liven it up, enabling Tabbed UI with application themeing is a feature you may want to try when this build goes stable.

Can’t wait? As long as you don’t require stability, download a nightly build of LibreOffice 26.8 for Windows or Linux from the project’s build server. There are macOS builds there too, however the coloured Tabbed UI backgrounds are available on macOS.

Plenty of ‘worthy’ features are on the way in LibreOffice 26.8 besides this. But good design makes a good impression and with the open-source office suite wars hotting up, those impressions matter more than ever.

Thanks Kristijan!