Ribbon designer, menu and toolbar designers for
Office Excel, Outlook, Access: VB.NET, C#

Add-in Express™
for Microsoft® Office and .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, wizards and in-place designers that make your Office plugin 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 Ribbon UI.
  • Customize the Quick Access Toolbar and Office Menu.
  • Build the Backstage View for MS Office 2010 - 2021.
  • Create custom task panes.
  • 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 Office toolbars.
  • Intercept any built-in controls.
  • Develop Smart Tag recognizers.
  • Program Microsoft Excel Real-Time Data servers and topics.
  • Create XLL-based functions for Excel.
  • And a lot of other things that have already been implemented by Add-in Express.
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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 an example of two visual designers for the most popular Office components: Ribbon UI and Toolbar designers. The Ribbon UI designer is purposed for designing your own ribbon tabs for Office 2021 - 2007, and the Toolbar designer is for creating Office 2003 - 2000 command bars.

Ribbon designer

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

Office Ribbon tab visual designer

Office 2021 - 2007 applications deliver several ribbons including ExcelWorkbook, WordDocument, AccessDatabase and PowerPointPresentation. You can create custom Office ribbon tabs and add them to any context of the 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 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.

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.

Office Toolbar visual designer
See Also