Excel VBA Programming For Dummies, 6th Edition

Chapter 19

Accessing Your Macros through the User Interface

IN THIS CHAPTER

Discovering how to customize the Ribbon

Adding icons to the Quick Access toolbar

Modifying shortcut menus

The Ribbon is the primary user interface (UI) for Microsoft Office applications — and for that matter, it’s the primary UI for Window’s File Explorer. Its feature-rich set of controls make it an excellent UI. You can use those same controls to launch your macros.

You might expect to be able to create custom Ribbon commands using VBA. The bad news is that you can’t use VBA to modify the Ribbon. The good news is that you’re not completely out of luck, as this chapter describes some of the ways to work with Excel’s UI.

Customizing the Ribbon

This section describes ways to customize the Ribbon. You can modify the Ribbon manually, but you can’t make changes to the Ribbon using VBA. It’s sad, but true. For example, if you write an application and you’d like to add a few new buttons to the Ribbon, you need to program those changes outside Excel, using a tool called RibbonX.

Customizing the Ribbon manually

It’s very easy to make changes to the Ribbon manually, but you must be using Excel 2010 or later. If ...