Sunday, November 1, 2009

A Ribbon Class - Another approach to using the new ribbon in your applications

Much has been written about the new "Office Fluent User Interface" that has been introduced with Office 2007. Also known as the ribbon, it's a whole new way to work with Access, Word, Excel and Powerpoint, replacing the menus and command bars we've all become accustomed to.

Like them or not as a user, Access developers have to deal with the reality that the custom command bars they have been using in their applications the past don't work the way they used to.

In this article Albert Kallal presents a neat approach to solving the problem of having your application interact with the ribbon. He's created a ribbon class which uses methods similar to the old command bar methods to operate on icons within the ribbon. I haven't tried using it in an application yet, but I ran the demo and it looks pretty neat.

See also: my other ribbon posts.

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