The developer tools in Office 365 offer a variety of features aimed primarily at content creation and automation. Without these tools, you drive your office with the handbrake on, so to speak, and rob yourself of numerous opportunities! So far, it has not been clear to me why these are not activated by default in Office 365 and also in the stand-alone applications (e.g. Office 2021), since you cannot damage anything here either, which would ultimately mean that your Office would no longer work. The developer tools in Office 365 offer a wide range of options for customizing and automating Office applications after activating the developer tools. Here are some of the most important:

• Automate repetitive tasks: Macros allow you to automate repetitive tasks, saving you time. For example, you can create a macro that applies specific formatting to a selection of cells or performs a specific action in a specific order.
• Form creation and customization: Form controls let you create and edit forms for users to fill out. For example, you can add a drop-down menu to provide a selection of options, or a check box to provide a yes/no option.
• Custom add-in creation: You can create your own add-ins that provide additional functionality and integrations. For example, you can create an add-in that inserts data into your workbook from an external data source or that updates a chart in real time.

Only a few steps are required to activate the developer tools in Office. To do this, proceed as follows:

• Start an Office application, such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
• Click on “File” and then on “Options“.
• Select “Customize the Ribbon” from the left pane of the Options window.
• In the “Options” window, select “Customize the ribbon” on the left.
• Under “Main Tabs“, select “Developer Tools“.

In the right pane of the “Excel Options” or “Word Options” window, now select the “Main Tabs” item. See “Main Tabs” for a list of tabs that appear on the ribbon. From here, select the “Developer Tools” option by ticking the appropriate box.

• Click “OK” to save the settings.

After you have followed these steps, the “Developer” tab will appear in all other applications, regardless of which application you made the setting in. Here, then, you’ll find the described capabilities of developer tools, including macros, add-ins, form controls, and more.

Note: It is possible (this was the case for me) that the developer tools were strangely not displayed in Outlook, but they were in all other Office applications. I cannot say why this is so. But you can just do the previous steps again in Outlook from the options menu and then the developer tools will appear there too.

see fig. (click to enlarge)