Access™ 2007 VBA Programmer's Reference

12.11. Summary

You can completely customize the Ribbon to suit the needs of your solutions. The tools described in this chapter take full advantage of the new Ribbon user interface in Office 2007.

This chapter provided an in-depth look at customizing ribbons. You explored the controls that are available, as well as put them to use in building a couple solutions of your own. By customizing the Ribbon, you can create new, innovative interfaces for your applications that are in line with today's standards.

The extensibility story for the Ribbon is quite large, and there are several pieces to it. For Access, it starts with the USysRibbons table, and the XML that you store in there. From there, you can implement callback routines that give you the power of VBA that you've had in the past with controls and command bars. You also learned how to display images in your customizations to give your interface a fresh look, and how to dynamically use data from tables in a database to provide content to the Ribbon.

Now you can take some of these techniques and create reusable objects to encapsulate Ribbon controls by using class modules. The next chapter provides an insight to working with objects, as well as new techniques that you can apply to your programming style to help create reusable, extensible applications of your own.