VSTO 3.0 for Office 2007 Programming

Creating a Ribbon menu for Outlook 2007

The Ribbon is the new way of presenting menus for Office users and organizing related commands; visually it will appear as controls. The Ribbon menu feature is supported in most of the Office 2007 applications, such as Word, Excel, and Outlook. InfoPath and Visio are not provided with the Ribbon menu feature.

Let's create a Ribbon menu for Outlook by using Outlook objects and Visual designer support. In this example, we will create a Ribbon menu with a button on it. When you click the button, the option for composing a new mail will open.

1. Open Visual Studio 2008 and create a new solution, as described earlier.
2. Next, let's add the Ribbon component to our solution. Right-click on the project, and select Add ...