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Office Fluent UI (Ribbon): New Visual Studio Code Snippets and Office Visual How-to Series

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The new Microsoft Office Fluent UI replaces the previous system of layered menus, toolbars, and task panes with a simpler system optimized for efficiency and discoverability. The new UI, including the Office Fluent Ribbon, provides improved context menus, enhanced screen tips, a Mini toolbar, and keyboard shortcuts that help to improve user efficiency and productivity. The new Office Fluent UI is implemented in several applications in the 2007 Microsoft Office suite, including Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word.

You can extend the Ribbon using XML and one of several conventional programming languages to manipulate the components that make up the Ribbon UI. To extend the Ribbon you use different callback signatures depending on the control types. We have seen a lot of questions related to this subject. For instance, onAction for a gallery may be different from onAction for a button.

<menu xmlns="https://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/01/customui">
    <button id="dynaButton" label="Button" onAction="OnAction" imageMso="FoxPro" />
<toggleButton id="dynaToggleButton" label="Toggle Button" onAction="OnToggleAction" image="logo.bmp" />
<menuSeparator id="div2" />
<dynamicMenu id="subMenu" label="Sub Menu" getContent="GetSubContent" />
</menu>

We wanted to provide a complete set of Ribbon XML snippets for every control/callback combination, and the corresponding function definitions, so Frank Rice built over 100 snippets divided between C# and VB .NET for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. You can combine the snippets with your VSTO project if you want to and you can find the snippets here:

Frank is currently working on a new set of Office Visual How-tos where he shows how to customize the 2007 Office Fluent User interface programmatically. You can find the first Visual How-To of the series here:

I will update this blog entry to list more as we publish them.

Frank has done a fantastic job teaching all of us how to customize the 2007 Office Fluent User interface. Make sure you visit his blog and the Office Fluent Ribbon Developer Portal.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2007
    PingBack from http://informativeposts.info/office-fluent-ui-ribbon-new-visual-studio-code-snippets-and/

  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2007
    "over 100 snippets divided between C# and VB .NET" This is Office, isn't it? For the vast majority of the Office solutions I've developed, .NET would have been vast overhead in terms of footprint of the solution and in terms of development time. Where are the VBA examples? The user interface has been ripped out of the OM, and there are no obvious means for an Office-only (dot-net-free) solution to access it. But then, none of my clients are rushing to adopt Office 2007, so I guess I can wait until the VBA examples are published.

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2007
    Visual Studio 2005 code snippets are a neat way to package pieces of code that you want to keep close

  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2008
    How can I integrate the ribbon bar in my windows forms?