Custom Ribbon Builder

Mike Alexander at Data Pig Technologies has written a table driven Ribbon modifier for Excel 07. I gave it a quick test drive today and it worked a treat.

I added that Font group at the end with the DoIt macro. I thought if I specified an existing group, it would put it there, but it didn’t. This is a huge step toward Ribbon customizability that’s going to be absolutely necessary once O07 rolls out. Mike asks that you give it a workout and make suggestions on how it can be implemented better. You can download the .xlsm file at

Custom_UI_Builder.zip

Thanks Mike.

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10 thoughts on “Custom Ribbon Builder

  1. Patrick Schmid has done a lot of work developing programmatic techniques for the Ribbon. He has his own UI blog at http://pschmid.net/blog

    I haven’t tried Mike’s or Patrick’s approaches yet, but when I get to that point (like in five years when my clients finally upgrade to 2007), I’ll know where to look.

  2. Thanks John,

    I can imagine that there will be many utilities that will need to be created to fix some of the issues created by XL 2007.

    One example I can think of is a utility that explodes datasets over 65536 lines into separate tabs upon request. This would allow large xlsx files to be saved to xls without issues.

    Can anyone else think of some?

  3. I updated my Table-Driven Ribbon Customizer. Get the updated version here.

    http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/Custom_UI_Builder.zip

    Changes Made:
    – Utility now creates and adds call back functions for all created buttons
    – Utility now allows user to apply “Start from Scratch”, hiding default Excel tabs
    – Image gallery updated
    – Other minor fixes

    Source code is open for review. I’m hoping someone will improve on the ideas here and create a better Table-Driven Ribbon Customizer.

  4. Quick question on understanding.. which is not really mentioned in the tutorial that I could see. Does the workbook that you want to use this in, need to house this sheet? What happens when a Excel 2003 user opens this? Will it still honor the custom menus written in that?

    Please advise and thanks. -R-

  5. Also a couple of other questions. In this thread it has a link to an updated file. When I update I am not seeing the Start New? Getting errors on Output Now… Is see that there a bunch of XLAM’s in the VBA Editor.. are there other addins needed to run this? -R-

  6. I think this is an excellent little tool. Does anyone know if a default tab can be selected so when the workbook is run, your new tab is selected automatically.

    Thanks

    Foseco


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