I know fairly well how to use a JTabbedPane
but it does not look like the tabs that you get in MS Word's ribbon . I want to know if there is a way to make the JTabbedPane
look like the ribbon in MS Word (or any other way to change its looks)
Yes, it depends on the look and feel. Substance has the look and feel you want. You can have a complete open-source ribbon component as well, see this question:
How to get a "ribbon" UI component, like in Office 2007, in a Java program?
Note that Insubstantial is a fork of Substance that is actively maintained. See this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5898028/what-happened-to-the-substance-laf