Issue: numbered labels appear over the Excel ribbon when pressing Option

The numbered labels you see when pressing Option are highly consistent with Excel’s KeyTips (ribbon keyboard navigation), consistent with the Alt‑key based KeyTips behavior in Windows Excel. Microsoft does not document Option as the trigger for this feature in your specific build (16.77.1), and there is no documented or officially supported method to disable it in that version.

A preference key (DisableOptionKeyRibbonAccess) has been mentioned in some Mac Office community discussions as a possible workaround. It is not documented by Microsoft and has not been verified to work consistently in your exact build, so it should be treated as an unverified test—not a confirmed fix.

If you wish to try it (fully reversible):

1. Quit Excel.
2. In Terminal, run:
   defaults write com.microsoft.Excel DisableOptionKeyRibbonAccess -bool true
3. Reopen Excel and press Option.

If the overlay disappears, the setting may be affecting behavior; if it remains, the key is likely ignored.

Remove it at any time with:
defaults delete com.microsoft.Excel DisableOptionKeyRibbonAccess

A full reinstall of the same version is unlikely to change this behavior if it is built into the application’s defaults (though it can help rule out configuration corruption). The only documented user-facing way to control this behavior is to use a current Microsoft 365 version, which includes an Accessibility checkbox to turn off KeyTips triggered by Option.

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Hope this will help you.

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