Ribbons - Gain Without The Pain

Published Wed, Sep 9 2009 10:57 | Bob Phillips

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If you are in the habit of building or customising Excel 2007 Ribbons, there is an indispensable new tool that has just hit the market. Andy Pope has released his RibbonX Visual Designer, which can be found here.

 

I have blogged previously about how I find cutting XML tedious, and the inadequate tools available, so this is a more than useful addition to make ribbon design and coding simpler. It provides a GUI to facilitate the Ribbon build, simple point and click rather than the tedious line coding. The big advantage of this approach is that you can see the hierarchy of your ribbon, and visualise what it will finally look like. To make it even better, there is a preview option, which will build a workbook and inject the XML so that you can ACTUALLY SEE what it will look like.

 

The tool adds a group to the Developer ribbon tab (so make sure that you make this visible)

and here is a screenshot of the designer, with a few example controls added.

 

In addition, you can load an existing workbook, and amend its ribbon. It has many other goodies which I won’t list here, check out the link above to read about them all.

 

As I said, a great tool, and at a good price - free!

 

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Comments

# Andy Pope said on September 10, 2009 2:43 AM:

Thanks Bob.

And it's way cool that I have a Tag :)

# sam said on September 10, 2009 3:59 AM:

I have played around with this from its Beta. Its a long way ahead of the pathetic Customization option in 2010

(Even though its Ver 1.2 and there are some minor glitches)

It reminds me of the "Real" Name Manager form JKP... way ahead of Name Manager in 2007/10

Great Work Andy Pope.

Just a Small Suggestion - Could you also Add the Customization Buttons to the "BLOB" button as well....

I have Classic Tab Installed and hence the Developer Tab is hidden all the time

# Bob Phillips said on September 11, 2009 5:17 AM:

@Andy - THE Pope has to have a tag

@Sam - I believe that the latest version is 1.4, some of your glitches may be fixed in that

# Andy Pope said on September 11, 2009 7:24 AM:

Thanks Sam. Good suggestion regarding the 'blob'.

I managed to use my own addin to create the new items. I will update my webpage and files over the weekend.

Try the latest file and see if the glitches are still there. If email me and we can try and remove them.

# Bob Phillips said on September 11, 2009 10:00 AM:

@Andy - aren't these tools great. I just updated my Ribbon Autogen to have more functions, so I generated the Ribbon  with itself. The beauty is that the time is spent on design, which is more important and more interesting, and the quality is better.

# liebesiech said on September 16, 2009 4:13 AM:

This is awesome. I'm just starting to use ribbons with MS Access and this tool is helping a lot. Thank you very much!!!

# Bob Phillips said on September 16, 2009 3:37 PM:

Don't thank me, thank Andy, he created it.

Whilst I can see it being useful even with Access, isn't it a bit of a fiddle as it create ribbon enabled workbooks, not dbs?

# Andy Pope said on September 17, 2009 2:42 AM:

Thanks liebesiech.

As Bob points out the add-in is aimed at Excel, although in theory the actual xml produced could manually be applied to a db or docx file.

# dilandinga said on October 4, 2009 4:02 PM:

rNUruq I bookmarked this link. Thank you for good job!

# Jeraotreme said on October 10, 2009 3:37 PM:

Great site. Keep doing.,

# Unalelian said on October 11, 2009 8:09 PM:

Very cute :-)))),

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