Access 2013 Bible

Chapter 30: Customizing the Ribbon

IN THIS CHAPTER

Working with the default Ribbon

Examining Ribbon architecture

Studying Ribbon controls

Learning the XML necessary to construct Ribbons

Adding VBA callbacks

Unless you're upgrading from Access 2003, the Ribbon will already be familiar to you. The Ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 and replaced the toolbar and menu system that ruled the computing world for decades. 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 introduced 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'll soon see, customizing the Ribbon is a very different process than using CommandBars to compose toolbars and menus in previous versions of Access.

On the Web

In the Chapter30.accdb database, 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. Included with the database are several XML files that are used in this chapter.

The Ribbon Hierarchy

The Ribbon itself is a fairly complex structure and is hierarchical in nature. At the top level are the tabs you see along the top of the ribbon. Each tab contains ...