Access® 2010 Bible

Chapter 29. Customizing Access Ribbons

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Learning about the new Access ribbon

• Working with the default ribbon

• Examining ribbon architecture

• Studying ribbon controls

• Learning the XML necessary to construct ribbons

• Adding VBA callbacks

Unless you've been working with Access 2007, the Office ribbon will be entirely new to you. In fact, the ribbon is the distinguishing characteristic of the Office 2007 and 2010 applications. The toolbars and menus were an effective user interface when working with a variety of tasks and operations, but the CommandBars model used in versions of Access prior to 2007 was quite complex, and sometimes difficult to program. The ribbon introduces an entirely new way of working with user interface components.

The ribbon is quite unlike traditional toolbars or menus, and supports features not possible with toolbars and menus. As you will soon see, customizing Access ribbons is a very different process than using CommandBars to compose toolbars and menus in previous versions of Access.

Note

In the Chapter29.accdb database, you can find several database objects needed to support the techniques described in this chapter. You can't see the USysRibbons table until you right-click the Navigation Pane, select Navigation Options, and select the Show System Objects check box in the Navigation Options dialog box.

Why Replace Toolbars and Menus?

Unlike previous version of Access where developers used CommandBar objects to build toolbars and menus, Access developers work ...