Customize The Office 2007 UI Ribbon, Part 1

Confused by the new UI Ribbons in Microsoft Office 2007, which have replaced the old familiar CommandBars (which were once called menu bars and tool bars)? (You may have noticed that there's no graphical editor to drag 'n drop items onto the UI Ribbons like we can with CommandBars in earlier versions of Office.) Don't know how to customize the UI Ribbon? Fear not. Free tutorials are available.

Frank Rice of Microsoft and Ken Getz of MCW Technologies, LLC, have written a series of three articles to help get you started programming custom UI Ribbons with XML. (No. I'm not kidding.) Those fancy UI Ribbons are done with XML code (at least the part we can customize). Neat, huh?

Frank's and Ken's first article is Customizing the Office (2007) Ribbon User Interface for Developers (Part 1 of 3). This tutorial shows how to customize the the Microsoft Office 2007 user interface (UI) Ribbon.

Frank's and Ken's second article is Customizing the Office (2007) Ribbon User Interface for Developers (Part 2 of 3). This article contains the details on reference material for the controls and method signatures of the UI Ribbon.

Frank's and Ken's third article is Customizing the Office (2007) Ribbon User Interface for Developers (Part 3 of 3). This article contains the UI Ribbon FAQ.

These articles and tutorial apply to the following software products:

• Microsoft Office Access 2007
• Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
• Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
• Microsoft Office Word 2007
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005