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Introduction I was recently chatting with a friend, and he was asking how you can have dynamic ribbon buttons, buttons that are available depending upon worksheet events. I knocked up a simple example, and I thought I would share it here for anyone else who might be interested. It takes a few steps, but it is remarkably easy. The example has three buttons within a single group, on a custom tab. The first button can be hidden by changing a cell value (a data validation cell in this case), or have its visibility restored. The second does nothing, whilst the … Continue reading Who Says The Ribbon Is Hard?

I recently needed to build an Excel addin that supported a variable number of options, with buttons to invoke the options. That in itself is not unusual, but I also wanted the numbers to be driven by the user; which always complicates matters. The definition of the buttons is simple, even allowing for the fact that it will be maintained by users. I could use a separate configuration workbook, an INI file, or even XML. As I am looking to make this a user driven facility, within an overall Excel framework, an Excel workbook seems the best option. For the … Continue reading Ribbon on the Fly, or the Zip

Excel 2003 Addins In Excel 2007 Excel 2007 and 2010 is so different in concept to Excel 2003 and before that there are many new challenges in providing solutions that can be deployed in either version. One challenge that I have been faced with is creating addins that may be used in Excel 2007 or earlier versions. My addins would usually have a menu and/or a toolbar to provide access to the functionality within the addin. In previous versions of Excel, this has been an elegant solution as most people are familiar with the menus and are easily able to … Continue reading Deploy Me Simple

  I have written before about hand-crafting XML so as to customise an Office 2007 ribbon at XML Is Such A Pain and Autogen’ed Ribbon Code   As I have mentioned before, the CustomUI editor is far from perfect. It does allow adding of  image files and to validate the XML, but the editing experience is absolutely awful.   My favourite editor is TextPad, and one of the useful features of TextPad is the facility to incorporate syntax files that are file type dependent, for instance a Visual Basic syntax file for .bas and .vbs file types. The syntax files … Continue reading You Say CustomUI Editor, I Say TextPad

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 If you are in the habit of building or customising Excel 2007 Ribbons, there is an indispensable new tool that has just hit the market. Andy Pope has released his RibbonX Visual Designer, which can be found here.   I have blogged previously about how I find cutting XML tedious, and the inadequate tools available, so this is a more than useful addition to make ribbon design and coding simpler. It provides a GUI to facilitate the Ribbon build, simple point and click rather than the tedious line coding. The big advantage of this … Continue reading Ribbons – Gain Without The Pain

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In a previous post, XML Is Such A Pain, I showed the technique that I use to simplify the creation of XML code for custom ribbons. This is a handy technique, as it means that creating the XML is very simple, it is more or less a cut-and-paste job, and I spend very little time thereafter  with the XML, which I like as the tools for XML in Excel 2007 are not great. As much as I like this technique, it still requires a lot of VBA code. Whilst VBA is a great deal … Continue reading Autogen’ed Ribbon Code

Normal 0 false false false Creating a custom ribbon tab in Excel 2007 is a well known technique by now, and relatively easy to achieve.  I will not go into the details here, there are many examples scattered across the web, I would suggest Ron de Bruin’s pages at http://www.rondebruin.nl/ribbon.htm. The biggest pain for me with custom ribbon code is the XML. As an example, to create a custom ribbon tab such as this requires the following XML code <customUI xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/01/customui” onLoad=”rxDemoRibbonOnLoad”> <ribbon startFromScratch=”false”> <tabs> <tab id=”tabDemo” getLabel=”Ribbon Demo” insertAfterMso=”TabHome”> <group id=”grpDemoGroup1″ getLabel=”Formatting Group”> <button id=”btnDemoButton1″ label=”Currency” image=”DollarSign” imageSize=”Large” screentip=”Button … Continue reading XML Is Such A Pain