Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Creating an Actions Pane

In addition to customizing the interaction with users within a document, Windows Forms controls are used to craft custom actions panes. Actions panes should be used to provide contextual data and command options to users as they are editing/viewing a document (either a Word document or an Excel workbook file).

There are several reasons why you would elect to implement your document interface using an action pane. One reason is that the actions pane is “linked” to the document but is not an actual part of the document—the contents of the actions pane won’t be printed when the document is printed. Another reason to implement an actions pane is to preserve the application’s document-centric focus: You can read and page through ...