Custom tab for the Excel 2007 ribbon

Today I created my first custom user interface tab for the Microsoft Excel 2007 ribbon. The intended purpose of this custom tab is to hold a collection of controls for accessing useful functionality not available as part of the default ribbon.

Toolbox seemed an apt name for my custom tab.

The only functionality this tab contains at the moment is a check box for toggling R1C1 style formatting. The code for this function was adapted from an example that appears in the book RibbonX: Customizing the Office 2007 Ribbon published by Wiley.

Ideally I would have liked to have created a set of radio buttons for controlling the Excel reference style. Unfortunately it seems that radio button controls are not supported in the Ribbon interface. The forum topic RibbonX radio buttons over at http://pschmid.net/ provides good commentary on this issue.

Other resources I found invaluable in modifying the Office 2007 Ribbon were:

• Microsoft's MSDN article Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 1 of 3)
• The Office 2007 Custom UI Editor
• Chapter 14 of the Excel VBA 2007 Programmer's Reference (ISBN 0470046430) available free.

A copy of the Excel 2007 Macro-enable workbook is available here. To install the toolbar more permanently you will need to save this file as an Excel Add-in, then enable it from the Excel Options menu.