Create Custom Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbons with the New Visual Designer in Visual Studio 2008

Provided by Dan Haught, Executive Vice President

With the release of Office 2007, the new Ribbon interface replaces the old menu and toolbars approach. At release time, ribbons were a difficult feature for developers because you had to rely on writing XML to modify or create custom Ribbons. With the release of Visual Studio 2008, that has all changed.

With the new release of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) in Visual Studio 2008, you can now use a visual designer to create your own custom Ribbons in Microsoft Access, Excel, Word, Outlook, etc. These Ribbons are encapsulated as add-ins for each of the specific Office 2007 products.

If you wanted to build your own custom Ribbons, but have held back by the lack of a visual designer, take a look at Visual Studio 2008. The visual designer is available under the New Project, Office, Office 2007 dialog.

More resources: Visual Studio Docs - Ribbon Designer

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