RibbonX: Customizing the Office 2007 Ribbon

Chapter 16. Sharing and Deploying Ribbon Customizations

Throughout this book, we've focused on customizing the Ribbon to best suit your needs, emphasizing functionality and convenience. It is now time to learn how to deploy customizations.

It is important to realize that every customization we built in this book was contained in a workbook, database, or document, and each customization was evident in that file only. As soon as you switched to another file, even within the same application, you would see a fresh and clean UI, with none of your customizations present. While this is a great feature to ensure that the UI is reset and not cluttered with irrelevant information, sometimes you will want to develop and use customizations across all files for a specific program.

That's why we'll now discuss how to share customizations. This chapter covers several methods, complete with both the pros and the cons of each approach. As each application deals with deployment in a slightly different manner, we cover each one separately to demonstrate the available techniques.

We begin by reviewing three ways to deploy custom solutions in Excel, and provide an in-depth discussion of the code and the modifications necessary to share customizations. The second section of this chapter covers similar material as it relates to Word.

The third portion of this chapter looks at our final RibbonX attribute: idQ. This attribute is specifically geared toward sharing elements across files, and it enables users ...