Published Wednesday, October 18, 2006 4:17 AM by martin

Office 2007: Extending Built-in Ribbon Tabs

If you want to add controls to ribbon tabs that are built into the Office 2007 applications, it's pretty much the same as creating your own tabs from scratch.  Here's a brief snippet of xml that does this kind of thing...

      <tab idMso="TabReviewWord">

        <group id="myGroup"

              label="My Group"

              insertBeforeMso="GroupComments"

              >

          <button id="myButton"

                  size="large"

                  imageMso="TextEffects3DRotationGallery"

                  label="My Button"/>

        </group>

      </tab>

The big question is how you know what all those "idMso" values are.  I mean, there are a lot of controls in those apps.  You can get all the details in this download.  You get a number of .xls files, containing all the IDs for tabs, groups and controls in every built-in ribbon.