Excel VBA Programming For Dummies

Chapter 19

Accessing Your Macros through the User Interface

In This Chapter

Getting to know ways to customize the Ribbon

Adding icons to the Quick Access Toolbar

Modifying shortcut menus

Before Office 2007, there was no such thing as a Ribbon. Back then, people used drop-down menus and toolbars. Now the Ribbon is the user interface for Microsoft Office — and Ribbon mania has even spread to other software, including Windows.

You might expect to be able to create custom Ribbon commands using VBA. The bad news is that you can't use VBA to modify the Ribbon. The good news is that you're not completely out of luck. This chapter describes some of the ways to work with Excel's user interface.

Customizing the Ribbon

This section describes ways to customize the Ribbon. You can modify the Ribbon manually, but you cannot make changes to the Ribbon by using VBA. Sad, but true. For example, if you write an application and you'd like to add a few new buttons to the Ribbon, you need to program those changes outside Excel, using something called RibbonX.

Customizing the Ribbon manually

It's very easy to make changes to the Ribbon manually, but you must be using Excel 2010 or later. If you use ...