Question

I have a shared COM AddIn (not VSTO) for excel 2003, now I want to add a ribbon tab to support excel 2007.
I did some research online.
know that I need reference 2007 PIA, implement
IDTExtensibility2, IRibbonExtensibility in my connection
and IRibbonExtensibility has only one method string GetCustomUI()

    string IRibbonExtensibility.GetCustomUI(string RibbonID)
    {
        return Properties.Resources.Ribbons;
    }

I add ribbons.xml in resources, ribbons.xml is as follows:

Not sure if this is the good/right way to do.
I want to customize like add icon to button, largeimage, smallimgae, connect command to button, etc.
I feel in xml, it is hard to do this.

There must be better way to achieve this, please let me know how

thanks

Answer 1

Nope, that’s about it when doing a shared addin without vsto.

You MIGHT be able to create a VSTO addin, setup the ribbon using that project, then extract just the ribbon control files and move them to youre shared add in.

In that case, for your GETCUSTOMUI method, you’d have to call the ribbon control to render it’s XML manually and pass that on through. I experimented briefly with that several months back but other things came up and I had to leave it.