Adding (missing) Ribbon’s controls

Nowadays I primarily use Excel 2007 and I must say that I really like the Ribbon UI which I also find easy to use. Given that the focus is on end users and their ability to use Excel toolbox it’s understandable that the Ribbon and RibbonX do not support the group of developers. At least not for the 1.0 “version” of the Ribbon UI.

When I’m not using the Excel Loader I find myself many times in situations where I need to have access to the two built-in Add-ins managers (for XLAs respectively COM). They are not easy to access via the Excel Options button. Therefore I have customized the Developer’s tab enabling me to access them better when needed. Of course, it would perhaps be even better if I used keyboard’s commands to access them. 

Maybe I’m wrong but I would say that they per default should be available under the Developer’s tab.

The following image is a screenshot of the customized tab:

  

The XML for the above customization is quite simple: 

Since I’m a power user of Add-in Express 2007 for Microsoft .NET I decided to create the same Ribbon customization in a managed add-in. This is done without a single line of code as the following steps will show:

Step 1 – Adding a Ribbon Tab object to the project:

Step 2 – Configure the Tab

Since we don’t add a new tab to the project we instead refer to the built-in Developer’s tab:

Step 3 – Add a group to the tab

The following image shows the configuration of the added group:

Step 4 – Add controls 

Since we want to use the built-in controls we refer to them when configure the added controls as the following image shows:

When running the managed add-in with Excel 2007 it adds the above customization. When we run the managed add-in with Excel 2003 or earlier we don’t need to take any further action to prevent it from being loaded.

I hope that I in my next blogpost can present the new and updated version of .NET Connection Tool.

With kind regards,
Dennis