Building Dynamic Interactive Ribbons

[Steve Bayliss]

Hi All,

I would like to start building interactive ribbons on my applications (as opposed to jamming all the commands in the freeze panes area and all the associated problems that they have)

I would like to be able to have components such as:

• dynamic runtime listboxes that can change based on other selections and actions.
• checkboxes
• possibly galleries (dynamic)
• possibly dialog box lauchers
• be able to hide/display ribbons based on the worksheet that is active
• enable/disable components as required

So I know that most of this is possible and I did one app a few years ago in 2010 that had some of this stuff and used the Custom UI tool that created the xml etc.

My question is: what are the latest tools that are out there for doing this and the where is the best documentation for creating this stuff.

I am thinking that the ribbons are only going to live in the workbook as opposed to an add-in as they will only be used by that app, but I am also interested in the process of creating add-ins using Visual Studio and knowing where to find good easy to follow documentation on this and how the whole process is performed.


Thanks guys

Steve