Quote from: Perry Mowbray on January 11, 2011, 05:19 AM

It would be interesting to know how you go... I've got lots of Excel and Word toolbars around the building and we're looking at upgrading shortly...

I only have the one, but it's used all over the country.  If and when I do something about it I'll let you know

Turns out the ribbon is easier to work with than I expected - had some downtime on Friday because of a systems outage so I spent some time on this

As usual the VBA help file is, well, less than helpful.  The info may be there, but I clearly don't know the right questions to ask.

A google search turned up several references but this one did the trick. 

Everythings in XML, and while I won't pretend that I know anything about XML structure or syntax, the structure as used is pretty straight foward. 

Greatest aid is the Custom UI Editor for MS Office (get it here).  It will generate sample code, includes a code validator, and will generate the necessary VBA stubs for you (you need to copy and paste into the editor if you're going to use them).  That last bit is worth noting - it took me a while to twig to the fact that there is a parameter you need to add to the called routines to make the buttons work properly.

No doubt there's more to the whole ribbon interface, but I only needed to get a new tab on the bar for my macro's so that's as far as I've taken it (but YMMV)

I really don't understand why MS doesn't get .NET into MS Office already. You can use it in SQL Server, so why not Office? VBA is, well, painful in comparison.

I couldn't comment on that one, though as with many things MS's reasoning defies most accepted forms of logic. 

VBA got me started on coding and I don't know C (in any variation).  From a user perspective .NET seems to be a significant piece of bloatware (who wants to download and install a huge - up 250M -  piece of extra software just so they can write or run a macro...)

That said I'm not averse to learning C, I just don't have a reason at the moment