You do not need a CustomUI Ribbon editor if using one of the many icons built into Office, only an XML editor, which can be NotePad or NotePad++. You can get a list of the many built-in icons. See Ribbon Images & Labels Part I by Greg Maxey. (Part II is about creating or adding your own icons.) Here is a link to an Excel file that must be stored in a trusted location: msoimagebrower. It lists and shows more than 5000 such icons built into Office giving their names and ids.

If you are adding your own images, as pointed out by Greg, you need the Custom UI editor. Links to two free ones can be found on Customize the Office Ribbon (It doesn't take rocket science) by Greg Maxey. I use the one from GitHub now.


Like Greg, I keep most of my QAT modifications in one or more global templates and some in document templates. I do not store any in the CustomUI file that is the default.

If you go down the rabbit hole of ribbon editing, the best book on the subject is RibbonX: Customizing the Office Ribbon by Robert Martin, Ken Puls, and Teresa Hennig. You may be able to download it from Ribbon X download. I really like the flexibility that ribbon editing using xml allows but it does have a learning curve.

In either case, remember that, unlike vba, XML is case-sensitive.