C# – Dynamically Customizing the Built-In Office 2007 Ribbon

coffice-2007ribbonvsto

I'm trying to dynamically customize the built-in Ribbon Controls on an Office2007 ribbon by adding C# objects such as RibbonTab, RibbonGroup, RibbonControl to the Ribbon. I have been unsuccessfull in disabeling any existing built-in controls, however I can add my own group. Now i'm thinking that disabling or hiding existing ones not be possible.

If anyone been able to hide a built-in control using code or the designer using .NET VSTO Office 2007 development, can you please post the code you used?

Thanks!

Best Answer

Here is a Stackoverflow question that talks about overriding built-in ribbon commands. Here is an MSDN video that shows it as well.

Related Solutions

R – Office 2007 Ribbon Programming How-to

These programs don't actually restore the old menu system, they modify the current Ribbon and then write the code to mock the old design.

This is where you need to start in order to modify the Ribbon.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa942866%28VS.80%29.aspx

I doubt the Ribbon is going to go away, so you probably will be better off taking the time to get used to it. I have, and now I much prefer this style menu system. In fact, I have been looking at code to implement this style in applications that I build.

Outlook Add-In – Enable/Disable Button during Runtime/from Code

You'll want to invalidate the Ribbon at a fairly frequent rate in order to refresh the visibility of each tab/button. You can do this by subscribing to the Click event (as you've done) and then calling RibbonObject.Invalidate();. Then add a getEnabled="yourTestFunction" parameter to each button, with public bool yourTestFunction(Office.IRibbonControl control) (Defined in the Ribbon.cs file) returning whether the web service is available or not.

Keep in mind if the web service is down, each click could hang your application for the amount of time you set on your timeout in the web service check

Edit:
Just realized the _Click event isn't mapped in the Excel COM library, so here's a bit of code that will run each time the cell selection is changed (not as frequent as every click, but hopefully good enough).

ThisAddIn.cs:

public static Excel.Application e_application;
public static Office.IRibbonUI e_ribbon;
    private void ThisAddIn_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
    {
        e_application = this.Application;
        e_application.SheetSelectionChange += new Excel.AppEvents_SheetSelectionChangeEventHandler(e_application_SheetSelectionChange);
    }

    void e_application_SheetSelectionChange(object Sh, Excel.Range Target)
    {
        e_ribbon.Invalidate();
    }

    private void ThisAddIn_Shutdown(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
    {
        e_application.SheetSelectionChange -= new Excel.AppEvents_SheetSelectionChangeEventHandler(e_application_SheetSelectionChange);
        e_application = null;
    }

Ribbon1.cs:

public void Ribbon_Load(Office.IRibbonUI ribbonUI)
{
    this.ribbon = ribbonUI;
    ThisAddIn.e_ribbon = ribbonUI; //Add this line
}

and

    public bool getEnabledTest(Office.IRibbonControl control)
    {
        //Whatever you use to test your Web Service
        //return false;
    }

Ribbon1.xml:

 <button id="WebService" label="Use The Web Service" onAction="executeWebService" getEnabled="getEnabledTest" />

Best Answer

Related Solutions

R – Office 2007 Ribbon Programming How-to

Outlook Add-In – Enable/Disable Button during Runtime/from Code

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