RibbonX Updates for B2TR
Today's Guest Writer: Savraj Dhanjal
Savraj is a Program Manager on the Office User Experience team focused on user interface extensibility for Office developers.
As you may have discovered, we made a few tweaks to the UI developer story in Beta 2 Technical Refresh.
The biggest change is the updated Control ID list we published yesterday. We've updated the name of nearly every command in Office to be more logical, searchable, and easy to understand. If you are interested in finding out the ID numbers of commands for use with Group Policy, you can find them in these lists as well, in the Policy ID column.
We do not expect to change these IDs again for RTM, so (cross our fingers) this is the final list for Office 2007. We hope you find the new Excel-based lists easier to use and more flexible than the text files released with Beta 2.
Download Office 2007 B2TR Control ID List
If you have Beta 2 UI customizations which use a large number of built-in control IDs, manually updating each ID will take a while. So we wrote a command-line tool, UpdateIdMso, that takes a customUI xml file containing Beta 2 ID's and outputs a file with updated B2TR IDs. We hope this tool will make the upgrade process a bit easier for you.
We also have a new customUI schema for B2TR. The schema has only a couple of notable changes. We renamed the fileMenu tag to officeMenu and also changed advanced to dialogBoxLauncher. We made these changes to ensure that the developer model matches the final feature names in the product.
Along with the control ID list, another reference we've created is the Office 2007 Icons Gallery. Open this file and you'll get a new group on the Developer tab in Excel, filled with galleries of the icons you can reuse in your Office 2007 solutions. Just click an icon, and you'll learn its control ID. Use this ID with the imageMso attribute to copy our icons to your controls.
Download Office 2007 Icons Gallery
Perhaps the most interesting functionality we added in B2TR is the ability to execute built-in controls by control ID, and the ability to query control properties by control ID.
For example, if you want to find out if the Save button is enabled, just call:
application.CommandBars.GetEnabledMso("FileSave")
and we'll return a boolean with the answer. And if you want to programmatically execute an obscure command that has no object model equivalent, just fire off:
application.CommandBars.ExecuteMso("MyObscureControlID")
The other functions are GetImageMso, GetLabelMso, GetPressedMso, GetScreentipMso, GetSupertipMso, and GetVisibleMso.
The VBA object browser lists the function parameters and return values, which will also be detailed on our MSDN site when it is updated in the coming weeks.
Thanks and let us know if you have questions. Happy solution-building!