frice's WebLog

SP1 Fix Affecting 64 bit Solutions in Access

Frank C. Rice — Mon, 23 May 2011 09:48:25 GMT

We are on-track to deliver SP1 in mid-summer 2011 (here is the official announcement). We definitely recommend this update for all Office 2010 users. If you’re one of the few 64-bit Access users working with compiled Access databases (ACCDE, MDE, and ADE files), be sure to check out this KB article that details an update process you’ll need to go through to have your files work properly with SP1.

Add-in that lists the IDs (idMSOs) of context menu controls is now available

Frank C. Rice — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:24:11 GMT

As part of Office 2010 extensibility, it is now possible to extend Context Menus exists, e.g. adding new buttons to a particular context menu in Word/Excel/etc.. To extend a particular Context Menu developers need to know the id name of that particular Context Menu; for that purpose UEX publishes every release a list with all the names of all the extensible controls in Office. However, is not easy for developers to look at the huge list and find the context menu he/she wants to extend because sometimes the names are not meaningful. To help developers with this task, Julián Argil Torres has developed a small add-in that adds at the end of the context menus a button with its name, also if the developer clicks the button, the name is stored in the clipboard.

You can find a link to the add-in at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905530.aspx

What's New for Office 2010 Developers white paper is live

Frank C. Rice — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:03:34 GMT

Learn about some of the new features and technologies for developers in Office 2010. View the paper at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff955606.aspx.

Introducing a new type of help for developers

Frank C. Rice — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:57:00 GMT

The Microsoft Developer Center introduces a new type of help documentation for developers. They are called Quick Notes and are intended to give you just the information you need to get common tasks accomplished.

They are very task oriented with no lengthy explanations. Just the steps necessary to get things done. There will be Quick Notes focused on Office tasks and SharePoint tasks. So check these out, with more on the way.

Quick Note: Getting Started with Web Part Development in SharePoint 2010

Quick Note: Connect Web Parts in SharePoint 2010

Check out the new article from Excel MVP Ron de Bruin

Frank C. Rice — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:19:00 GMT

The article titled Using VBA in Excel to Send Workbooks and Ranges through E-Mail with Outlook (Part 1 of 2) has been publish. In this, the first of a two-part series, Ron describes ways of sending Excel workbooks, worksheets, and so forth to Outlook by using the Outlook object model. Ron also provides links to a cool add-in that he has created. Check it out!

New Office Talk column on using Office Open XML is now available

Frank C. Rice — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:01:00 GMT

I've written a new Office Talk column on creating form letters in Word 2007 and Word 2010 by using bookmarks and Office Open XML. The column, titled Creating Form Letters in Word by Using Bookmarks and Office Open XML Files is available at:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee956565(office.11).aspx

In the column I describe how to create a Visual Studio console application in both C# and Visual Basic .NET. The project uses automation to retrieve addresses from an Excel workbook, and populates a sequence of bookmarks in a Word document (created from a template) which has been opened as an Office Open XML package. One form letter is created for each address retrieved. Check it out.

Lots of new resources for the Office 2010 Backstage View UI and 64-bit Office

Frank C. Rice — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:54:00 GMT

Be sure and take a look at the following articles and downloads for both the Office 2010 Backstage view and the 64-bit version of Office. Also stay tuned for additional articles, code samples, and videos related to the Office 2010 UI.

Download: Office 2010 Schema: Fluent User Interface Schema (https://download.microsoft.com/download/F/F/3/FF36D32F-4080-494B-83B8-49DADC68A999/Office2010FluentUISchema.exe)

Download: Office 2010 Help Files: Office Fluent User Interface Control Identifiers (https://download.microsoft.com/download/0/7/B/07BF35CE-4FA1-4DED-B4AA-3801D4E49F89/Office2010ControlIDs.exe)

Introduction to the Office 2010 Backstage View for Developers (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee691833(office.14).aspx)

Customizing the Office 2010 Backstage View for Developers (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee815851(office.14).aspx)

Deploying a Customized Ribbon and Quick Access Toolbar in Office 2010 (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee704589(office.14).aspx)

Targeting User Interface Solutions to the 2007 and 2010 Releases of Microsoft Office (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee704588(office.14).aspx)

Customizing Context Menus in Office 2010 (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee691832(office.14).aspx)

Ribbon Extensibility in Office 2010: Tab Activation and Auto-Scaling (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee691834(office.14).aspx)

Compatibility Between the 32-bit and 64-bit Versions of Office 2010 (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee691831(office.14).aspx)

Enjoy!

The Office Developer Resources Ribbon UI Add-in

Frank C. Rice — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:27:00 GMT

The Microsoft Office Developer Center (ODC) (https://msdn.microsoft.com/office) contains a tremendous number of how-to articles, videos, code samples, and so forth to help you create Office solutions. The menus and links on the ODC are pretty handy for navigating the labyrinth of helpful information. However, I thought it might be helpful to create a tab on the Ribbon UI that enables you to get to this information from inside of Word 2007.

I created a Visual Basic .NET shared add-in in Visual Studio that creates a tab on the Word 2007 Ribbon. The tab is divided into groups that somewhat mirror the tabs found on the ODC. The groups contain buttons and gallery controls that contain links to different pages in the ODC. As with any custom Ribbon customization, the add-in contains an XML file that defines the structure and components that make up the tab. The add-in also contains callbacks that give the controls their functionality.

Note The add-in is available at: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/OfficeDevResourceTab/

Figure 01. The Office Developer Resources tab in Word 2007

Figure 02. The Office Developer Resources tab in Word 2007 - continued

In this posting, I won’t go into the steps to create the add-in. You can find detailed procedures for creating a shared add-in to customize the Ribbon UI in the three-part series of articles titled Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338202.aspx). I will provide the XML and the VB .NET code for the callbacks which you can substitute for those found in the articles.

The XML is relatively simple in that it consists of a number of repetitive groups containing buttons and a couple of gallery controls. The buttons provide links to the different page on the ODC. The galleries provide a selection of related links to the developer centers for the Office 2007 products and the technologies that use or are used by the Office system such as Office Business Applications (OBA) and the Open XML file format.

<tabs>

group>

gallery>

gallery>

group>

group>

group>

group>

group>

tab>

tabs>

ribbon>

customUI>

In looking at the XML, I handled the links to the Web pages in two ways, depending on whether I was using a button or a gallery item. For buttons, I added the link to the tag attribute inside the button definition XML. Then, I specified a callback in the onAction attribute where all I did was run Internet Explorer and pass the button’s control.tag value, as shown here.

Private Const ie As String = "c:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore "

Sub openPage(ByVal control As IRibbonControl)

Dim RetVal As Object

RetVal = Shell(ie & control.Tag, vbMaximizedFocus)

End Sub

In the gallery control, there is no tag attribute so I had to use a different technique. When you click an item in the gallery, a callback, specified in the onAction attribute of the gallery control, is called passing in an IRibbonControl object, which represents the control that made the call. The IRibbonControl object includes the Id property. In the callback, I test the control’s Id property in a Select Case statement and assign the Web page address value for that control to a String variable. Following the Select Case statement, just as in the previous code sample, I run Internet Explorer, passing the constant for the Web address and page value of the specific Web page.

Private Const address As String = "https://msdn.microsoft.com/office/"

Sub galOpenPage(ByVal control As IRibbonControl, ByVal id As String, ByVal index As Integer)

Dim RetVal As Object = Nothing

Dim page As String = ""

Select Case id

Case "Access"

page = "aa905400.aspx"

Case "Excel"

page = "aa905411.aspx"

Case "InfoPath"

page = "aa905434.aspx"

Case "Outlook"

page = "aa905455.aspx"

Case "PowerPoint"

page = "aa905465.aspx"

Case "Project"

page = "aa905469.aspx"

Case "SharePoint"

page = "aa905503.aspx"

Case "SPDesigner"

page = "bb421303.aspx"

Case "Visio"

page = "aa905478.aspx"

Case "Word"

page = "aa905482.aspx"

Case "WSS"

RetVal = Shell(ie & "https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default.aspx", vbMaximizedFocus)

Case "OBA"

page = "aa905528.aspx"

Case "FluentUI"

page = "aa905530.aspx"

Case "OpenXML"

page = "aa905545.aspx"

Case "VBA"

RetVal = Shell(ie & "https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/isv/aa905357.aspx", vbMaximizedFocus)

Case "VSTO"

RetVal = Shell(ie & "https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsto/default.aspx", vbMaximizedFocus)

End Select

' You have already run the shell on these cases.

If (id <> "VBA" And id <> "WSS" And id <> "VSTO") Then

RetVal = Shell(ie & address & page, vbMaximizedFocus)

End If

End Sub

You will notice that I handled the Case statements for three of the controls slightly differently. The addresses for those sites were different than those for the other controls, so I couldn’t use the same address constant.

The next task concerns the images shown for each button and gallery item. As you can see in the XML, the majority of the buttons and gallery items use images built into Office as denoted by the imageMso attribute. However, for the remaining Bitmap images, I first added them to the add-in as project resources. How to do this is also described in Part One of the three-part series of articles I mentioned previously.

There are a couple of ways to add custom images to the Ribbon and I use both here. The most common way is to use the loadImage attribute of the element and point to a callback that loads the images. By using this method, all of the images are loaded once when the Ribbon is displayed. Then, all you need to do to use a particular image for a control is use the image attribute and assign the name of one of the images to it. The following callback is used to load the image for the VSTO item in the Technologies gallery.

Function getVSTOImage(ByVal imageId As String) As IPictureDisp

Return PictureConverter.IconToPictureDisp(My.Resources.VSTO)

End Function

I used this callback for just the VSTO item because the gallery item attribute does not include a getImage attribute (I will use that attribute in the next section). So to summarize, the image is loaded when the Ribbon is displayed and the image attribute specifies which image to display for the control. Note that the image has to be returned to Office as an IPictureDisp object. I’ll show how the image is converted shortly.

The other way to load custom images is by using the getImage attribute of the button to point to a callback that individually loads the images. Similar to the way I assign Web page links to the various buttons, in the getImages callback pointed to in the getImage attribute, I use a Select Case structure to test the Id property of the IRibbonControl object and return the image appropriate to the control.

Function getImages(ByVal control As IRibbonControl) As IPictureDisp

Select Case control.Id

Case "devCenterBtn"

Return PictureConverter.IconToPictureDisp(My.Resources.MSDN)

Case "spBtn"

Return PictureConverter.IconToPictureDisp(My.Resources.MSDN)

Case "officeSysBtn"

Return PictureConverter.IconToPictureDisp(My.Resources.officesystem)

Case "codePlexBtn"

Return PictureConverter.IconToPictureDisp(My.Resources.CodePlex)

Case "codeGalleryBtn"

Return PictureConverter.IconToPictureDisp(My.Resources.CodeGallery)

Case "channel9Btn"

Return PictureConverter.IconToPictureDisp(My.Resources.Channel9)

Case "twitterBtn"

Return PictureConverter.IconToPictureDisp(My.Resources.twitter)

Case "facebookBtn"

Return PictureConverter.IconToPictureDisp(My.Resources.facebook)

Case Else

Return PictureConverter.IconToPictureDisp(My.Resources.officesystem)

End Select

End Function

To convert the image to the IPictureDisp object required by the Ribbon, I added the following class to the add-in project. More information about this class is also included in Part One of the article series.

Friend Class PictureConverter

Inherits AxHost

Private Sub New()

MyBase.New(String.Empty)

End Sub

Public Shared Function IconToPictureDisp(ByVal icon As Bitmap) As stdole.IPictureDisp

Return CType(GetIPictureDispFromPicture(icon), stdole.IPictureDisp)

End Function

End Class

And so that is all there is to it. Hopefully you will find this add-in helpful.

Excel's Worksheets and Sheets Collection - What's the Difference?

Frank C. Rice — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 11:07:00 GMT

Among the top four objects most searched for on the Microsoft Developer Network by Excel programmers are the Sheets collection and the Worksheets collection (the other two are the Range object and the Application object). As an aside, I've written new articles on programming the Range and Application objects which will be published on the Office Developer Center in January 2008.

For new Excel programmers, there might be some confusion as to the difference between the Sheets and Worksheets collections. The Worksheets collection contains the items you typically think of on an Excel worksheet: rows, columns, cells, and formulas. The Sheets collection, on the other hand, consist of not only a collection of worksheets but also other types of sheets to include Chart sheets, Excel 4.0 macro sheets (also known as XLM files) and Excel 5.0 dialog sheets (allows you to create custom dialog boxes). Chart sheets are charts that take up an entire worksheet, but not charts that are inserted as part of a worksheet. The Excel 4 and Excel 5 sheets are legacy items used to maintain backwards compatibility and ease the transition from older versions of Excel to new. And just to further muddy the waters, there is also a Charts collection that is made up of chart sheets.

The Count property of the Worksheets collection contains the number of worksheets in a workbook. The Count property of the Sheets collection contains the number of all sheets in a workbook to include chart sheets and worksheets. For example, you can add a specific number of worksheets to a workbook with the following:

Do While Worksheets.Count < 5
ThisWorkbook.Sheets.Add
Loop

The worksheets you add may then become either a chart sheet or left as a worksheet, at which time, they become part of the Charts or Worksheets collection, respectively, or collectively become members of the Sheets collection. In the following example, you change the name of the last sheet in a workbook:

Dim wrkSheetName As String
wrkSheetName = "Projected Sales Chart"
Sheets(Sheets.Count).Name = wrkSheetName

Note that because you are using the Sheets collection, the last sheet in this workbook could be either a worksheet or a chart sheet. Given the name, it is likely a chart sheet.

As you might expect, the Sheets collection contains more methods than the Worksheets collection since it is home to more types of sheets. However, in both collections, there are a variety of methods to do such things as add, delete, copy, and move a sheet. There is ample documentation on these and other properties, methods, and events of the Worksheets and Sheets collections from the Excel portal on Office Developer Center on MSDN (https://msdn.microsoft.com/office).

Check out these new articles on MSDN

Frank C. Rice — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:23:00 GMT

The article Calling Excel 2007 Custom Wizards from the Office Fluent Ribbon by Using VBA (https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb927654.aspx) demonstrates how to create a custom wizard in Excel 2007 using VBA and then modify the Ribbon to call the wizard.

Albert Raiani does a great job in explaining how to trigger custom code when you drag data from an external source onto a Excel 2007 worksheet in his newly released article Adding Drag-and-Drop Functionality using the .NET Framework and Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition (https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb840032.aspx). Lots of examples also.

Also, take a look at the six-part Office Talk columns titled Bringing Improvements to the Excel 2007 Table (Part 1 through 6) (https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb693324(office.11).aspx) on enhancements to data tables in Excel 2007 and how working with tables is much easier than in previous versions.

Enjoy!