Pro V1.1 Feature Tour - Part 5: Using RibbonCustomizer™ for RibbonX development
RibbonCustomizer™ is primarily an end user tool. However, there are a two things in RibbonCustomizer™ designed to help with RibbonX development.
Show RibbonX for customizations
RibbonCustomizer™ can show you the RibbonX it created for a particular customization. To demonstrate this, I created a customization in Word that removes the Home tab, adds a new tab, adds the Clipboard group and adds a new group with a few controls. You can see this in the screenshot below.
To obtain the RibbonX for this customization, I opened the Customize Ribbon dialog again, and clicked on Show RibbonX as shown below.
RibbonCustomizer™ then shows the RibbonX to me and provides an easy way to copy it to the clipboard as indicated in the next screenshot.
As a RibbonX developer, you can now use this RibbonX in multiple ways:
- Paste it into the Custom UI Editor to embed it into a document/template for Excel, PowerPoint or Word.
- Paste it into the USysRibbons table of Access as described in this Access 2007 blog post.
- Paste it into an XML file that you compile as resource into your COM add-in.
- Paste it anywhere you like and use it any way you want.
RibbonCustomizer™ V1.1 only allows you to add Microsoft controls as well as separators to a group. The goal for V1.2 is to support all RibbonX elements, but not all RibbonX attributes (as many attributes are not useful for end users).
Load a RibbonX file
RibbonCustomizer™ Professional can load a RibbonX file directly. The RibbonX file can contain callbacks, which RibbonCustomizer™ will not pass on to Office in order to avoid custom UI errors in Office. If the RibbonX file contains errors that are serious enough for Office to not display the Ribbon customizations passed to it by RibbonCustomizer™, RibbonCustomizer™ will recover from this error the next time you open the respective Office application (this does not apply to Outlook). When you reopen the respective Office application, RibbonCustomizer™ will disable all customization schemes (including the Default one), and present you with an error message that states what happened and how to recover from it. You will have to re-enable all customizations individually, including Default. Please see part 4 of this feature tour on how to do this.
To load a RibbonX file, follow the steps outlined in part 4 for using a package. In the open dialog however, change the file type to RibbonX Files (*.xml).
RibbonCustomizer™ V1.1 will not pass on any changes to the Office button menu and the Quick Access Toolbar to the respective Office application. Support for this is planned in a future version.