Activating a Custom Tab on the Ribbon When a Document Is Opened (Harry Miller)

Published 12 August 08 05:36 PM

A lot of people would like to do this. It makes sense that a developer would want to select the custom tab automatically, if the controls that are most useful for the current document are all on that tab. This video goes in-depth about this programming question.

OK, not really. The video just says you can't do it, because the Ribbon is designed with the idea of leaving the user in control of the UI -- no surprise selection changes. But you should watch the video anyway. It's really short, and, you know, kinda funny.

Related resources

Forum: Is there a way to activate a certain tab on the Ribbon?

Duration: 1 minute, 8 seconds

by VSTO Team

Filed under: Ribbon, Harry Miller, video

Comments

# Jon Peltier said on August 13, 2008 7:10 AM:

It's kind of amazing that so many of the changes imposed by the Ribbon UI were sold as, ahem, good things.

# Andrew Whitechapel said on August 19, 2008 10:35 PM:

Harry 'Play It Again Sam' Miller has posted a wonderfully funny video on this topic - with a serious

# John Walkenbach said on August 25, 2008 7:43 PM:

Somebody tell this guy about Sendkeys.

# HarryMiller said on August 26, 2008 3:56 PM:

Yeah, you can kinda get around it with SendKeys. In fact, the forum thread that's linked up there under "related resources" has a post by BernyInFrance that shows some VBA code for using SendKeys, with the warning that it doesn't always work.

# JohnKoz said on August 29, 2008 6:00 PM:

But Office itself violates this very principal, you can see it if you: create a blank Word document; click “Insert>Table”. Poof, “Table Tools” appears and the ribbon focus is changed to the “Design” tab in the ribbon. How does this fit into the rational?

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