How to extend the Ribbon in MS Office

The Fluent UI, or as it’s better known the Ribbon, was introduced in Office 2007.

The Fluent UI technology, like the Open XML formats, is based on XML, which allows for a richer extensibility story for developers.

Erika Ehril’s blog post describes several tools and resources related to Fluent UI extensibility. Brian Jones extend her post by showing you how the Open XML SDK can be used to extend or actually control custom UI within documents.

As is the case with other features in Open XML files, the Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office supports Fluent UI through strongly typed access to the custom UI xml part as well strongly typed access to the underlying xml contained within the custom UI xml part.

In other words, you can easily add, remove or modify custom UI for a particular document or set of documents using the SDK.

In this post, Brian show’s you how to add custom UI to a set of documents within a directory.

http://blogs.msdn.com

FYI: You can also download this solution here.