Customizing Office 2007 Ribbon, Office Menu,
Quick Access Toolbar. Visual designers for C#, C++, VB.NET.

You use visual designers and components instead of coding

Add-in Express offers you a component-centric programming model. It contains plenty of Office-specific components and containers that make your add-in and plug-in development fast and easy. In general, you use visual designers and special components to:

• Create your own or customize existing toolbars, menus and sub-menus for Microsoft Office 2000 - 2003.
• Add new or customize existing tabs for the Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon UI.
• Build the Quick Access Toolbar and the Office Menu for Microsoft Office 2007.
• Create custom task panes for Office 2007 applications.
• Customize Outlook windows, views and forms with Advanced Form Regions.
• Develop application-level keyboard shortcuts.
• Add Microsoft Outlook option and property pages.
• Use any .NET controls on Microsoft Office toolbars.
• Intercept any built-in controls.
• Develop Smart Tag recognizers.
• Program Microsoft Excel RTD servers and topics.
• Create XLL-based functions for Excel.
• And a lot of other things that have already been implemented by Add-in Express.

You don't use visual designers only to write your applied code. In other words, Add-in Express implements all things required by supported technologies, you concentrate your efforts on the applied code only.

Below you can see two sample designers for common Office components: Ribbon UI and Toolbar designers. The former is a designer for Office 2007 ribbon tabs, the latter is a designer for common Office toolbars (command bars).

Ribbon UI visual designer

With Add-in Express you can forget about manual authoring of XML for your ribbons. Add-in Express has several Office 2007 Ribbon-related components such as the ribbon tab component with a visual designer. Using this designer you can customize your Office 2007 ribbon tabs in a way more comfortable than creating Ribbon XML.

Office 2007 applications deliver several ribbons including ExcelWorkbook, WordDocument, AccessDatabase and PowerPointPresentation. You can add your custom ribbon tabs in any context of these ribbons. The Add-in Express Ribbon UI designer groups ribbon tab controls in a treeview, provides a flexible way to design your ribbon tabs, and performs XML schema-validation on the fly. The RibbonTab component supports all types of Office 2007 Ribbon controls including regular and button groups; regular, edit, combo and check boxes; buttons and split buttons; labels and dropdown lists; galleries and menus; separators and dialog launchers. All Ribbon controls can be created and customized through the designer. More about Office 2007 Ribbon customization.

Toolbar designer

Add-in Express offers you the same way for constructing Office 2000-2007 toolbars. It includes a special toolbar component with a visual designer for its Controls collection. To customize the add-in toolbar, just run the Add CommandBar command of the add-in module, select the added component and click on its Controls collection on the Properties window.