Office 2007 UI Extensibility
One of the cool things about Office 2007 is the flexibility of the new ribbon interface for third-party developers. You can now extend the Office 2007 UI in all the ways you could extend previous versions of Office, plus some all-new options.
One of the new options is writing declarative XML to add groups to the ribbon: you can customize the ribbon’s contents without writing a single line of code. Well, you have to write some code to actually do anything useful, of course, but the visual aspects are specified in simple XML.
Savraj Dhanjal is the go-to guy for this type of information within Microsoft. If you’ve seen a cool Office UI extensibility demo at a Microsoft event lately, Savraj probably had something to do with it. So I’m excited to see that he’s going to be writing a series of guest posts on Jensen Harris’s blog in the next few weeks that cover how the new UI extensibility works. His first post, today, covers the basics of the ribbon extensibility model. This should be a great series, so if you’re a developer interested in customizing Office 2007 be sure to check it out.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 16th, 2006 at 9:42 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on March 30, 2006 at 11:18 am Doug’s World » More Tips from Savraj wrote:
[…] I mentioned in an earlier post that Savraj Dhanjal has started doing guest posts on Jensen Harris’s blog about programming the Office 2007 clients. Client extensibility is one of the areas where Office has really been beefed up in this version, and there are lots of great options for developers to customize the user interface. […]