frice's WebLog

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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: http:/...

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...

The Microsoft Office Developer Center (ODC) ( http://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...

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...

The article Calling Excel 2007 Custom Wizards from the Office Fluent Ribbon by Using VBA ( http://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...

One of the coolest features in Office that I think many people (well, at least me) overlook is the translation capability. You can type in a word and get a translation immediately in any language you select. I'm currently trying to teach myself Spanish...

Visual Studio 2005 code snippets are a neat way to package pieces of code that you want to keep close at hand. These can be code samples that you've created or samples that you find during searches. And creating them is pretty easy with some of the free...

Just a quick note to say that there is new developer content on the Office Developer Center ( http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/default.aspx ). These include over one hundred Ribbon code snippets that can be dropped into Visual Studio solutions...

In this topic on customizing the Ribbon UI, we'll look at different scenarios for customizing the Ribbon at the application-level by using COM add-ins. These modifications could just as easily be applied to a specific document with document-level customizations...

In the previous blog, I created a COM add-in in managed C# code that customized the Ribbon UI regardless of which document was open. In this topic, I use the same customization XML and create the add-in in Visual Basic 6.0. The existing Ribbon UI in Word...

In this installment in the series on customizing the Ribbon UI, we'll look at adding application-level customization. In the previous blog, we detailed the steps to create document-level Ribbon by modifying an Open XML Formats macro-enabled file in Word...

In this blog, I will walk through an example of adding a custom tab, custom group, and a button with a simple callback procedure to the Ribbon in a Word 2007 document. To get started: 1. Create the customization file in any text editor by adding the...

In the previous blog, I discussed reasons for the new Office Ribbon UI, ways to customize the Ribbon, parts of the Ribbon, and gave an example of an XML customization file. In this blog, I'll talk some about callback procedures that give the Ribbon's...

This is the first in a series of topics focusing on the new Office 2007 user interface (UI) and Ribbon extensibility, also called RibbonX. By now, you've probably seen blogs, press releases, and other information on the virtues and benefits of the new...

One of the views associated with creating queries in the Query designer in Access is the SQL window. The SQL window displays SQL statements that are created behind the scenes when you create a query. However, the SQL window doesn't display just SQL statements...

Just as Michael Corleone said in Godfather III, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." I'm not talking about organized crime. I'm talking about XBox. Until about two years ago, I was a major Quake affectionato. I couldn't wait to get home...

One of the subjects that made me nervous when taking computer science classes in college was recursive programming. It was easy to accidentally write a recursive (i.e. never-ending} program but it was sometimes hard for me to determine when I should write...

I recently had a customer ask how he could freeze objects, in this case a set of buttons, so that they didn't disappear as he scrolled through his Excel spreadsheet. This sounds like it would be a common request and have a topic in Excel help. However...

In my last blog, I talked about debugging with the Watch window where you can do things such as look at the value of expressions at some point in the code execution and halt execution when a variable reaches a specific value. Other useful tools to help...

The Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) integrated development environment (IDE) seen in the Microsoft Office applications contains lots of tools to help you diagnose and fix errors in your code. However, many of us don't take advantage of the tools that...