I have a toolbar with some actions linked to macros in Personal.xls. I want to use the toolbar in Excel 2010 under Win7, but it insists C:\Documents and Settings\user\App...\PERSONAL.XLS doesn't exist. Quite right, they've changed the %AppData% location to C:\Users\user... And I can't put a copy of PERSONAL.XLS in the old place because C:\Documents and Settings\ is special-cased in Windows 7, and it's a forbidden place to everyone.
My question: How can I reset the macro linked to the toolbar buttons?
You used to be able to access
the Commandbars collection to get a command bar
The Controls collection of the command bar to get a control (button in this case)
The OnAction property of the control to identify the linked macro.
But OnAction doesn't seem to be a supported property for Excel 2010.
Any suggestions?
I'd much rather relink the toolbar than create a new custom ribbon tab. The toolbar buttons don't waste the APALLING amount of space custom ribbon items take up, and the custom icons on my toolbarare meaningful. Subsiduary question: Are there simple ways to create custom designs for custom ribbon items?
Looks like I didn't investigate closely enough. "OnAction" might not appear in the Object Browser, but it is available, and can be used to reset the associated toolbars. It didn't seem to work using the Immediate window, but does work within code in a module.
Cheers folks...
Related
I am creating a windows using win32:
HWND mainWnd = CreateWindow(...);
Now I can add gui elements as children of mainWnd. However this soon becomes a bit tedious and I want to use the designer built into Visual Studio to help me.
I noticed that under Add Resource there is a Dialog entry. Among the dialogs IDD_FORMVIEW seems the most general so I added one of these. Next I added gui elements to it using the designer.
Now I want to use this as a child of my mainWnd. How do I do this?
I found some examples using DialogBox, but I do not want a separate dialog, I want this window as a child of my mainWnd.
The designer in Visual Studio is appropriate for creating dialog boxes, not arbitrary windows.
That being said, there are a couple of approaches (in increasing order of difficulty):
Make your main window a dialog. Petzold's book has an example of using a dialog as the main window of the program. (If I recall correctly, it's the calculator example.)
Create the dialog and, before you show it, change its style to WS_CHILD, change its extended style to WS_EX_CONTROLPARENT, and parent it to your main window. For all the navigation stuff to work, you'll have to add IsDialogMessage calls in your message pump. This is do-able, but it's likely hard to get everything working well.
A mixture of 1 and 2 where you create one dialog for your main window, then create a second dialog for the content (with DS_CONTROL), and put the second dialog in the first. I've never tried this approach myself, but it seems like it should work.
Write your own code to parse the dialog resource and create the child windows, which is basically re-doing a lot of the work that CreateDialog does for you.
Given your desire to use the GUI to design the UI, I suspect only the first solution is simple enough that you would be interested.
Use the CreateDialog API to create the window from the resource. If you do not want it to look like a dialog then remove the titlebar style from the resource properties.
To use a dialog created from a dialog resource template you have to specify the DS_CONTROL window style in the template.
Read more about dialog boxes here.
Dialog resources are explained here
In Excel 2010 for Windows, I associated a Click event to an ActiveX Control. In Excel 2011 for Mac, I understand I must use Form Controls rather than ActiveX Controls. How do I associate a Click with a Form Control command button? I don't seem to be able to get at the Properties of a Form Control as I previously did with an ActiveX Control.
This assumes that Mac Form Controls act like Windows ones. When you first create the button, you'll see the Assign Macro dialog. If you've already created the macro, you can select it then:
If you want to assign the macro later, you need to get the Assign Macro dialog. In Windows, you'd right-click like this:
I'm realizing this is not my most helpful answer ever, but hopefully it's good enough.
I want to achieve that when the user installs the WP7 control library he will find it in the Visual Studio toolbox automatically without manually adding it. In addition I would like to organize toolbox tabs in a logical manner.
I know it can be done for other platforms. For example I tried writing *.design.dll as described here - it does not work for WP7.
Any pointers how to work with toolbox for VS 2010 / WP7?
Nobody answered, so here is my brief summary:
The control library cannot be added to the Toolbox automatically unless you program VS plugin (package). Too much work for me...
*.design.dll (see the link above) basically works.
2a) You can hide controls from the Toolbox (BrowsableAttribute) and you can define control icons. That's probably everything you can do for Toolbox. The user has to add Toolbox tabs and "choose items" manually.
Well, I am not quite sure here, because when you drop the control dll file onto the Toolbox, then at least ToolboxTabNameAttribute works, i.e. corresponding Toolbox tabs are created automatically. Unfortunately, the tab is empty.
Also, when the control library is properly installed, then some of the controls are added to Choose items Toolbox dialog. Unfortunately, in my case most of the controls are missing and have to be added by manual browsing.
2b) Designer support (Properties window for the control) is better. You can hide properties (BrowsableAttribute), define categories (CategoryAttribute) and define descriptions (DescriptionAttribute).
Descriptions can be extracted from you documentation xml file, so that you don't need to write them again. To get the code google for MetadataBase.cs. Just be carefull, the files you'll find contain fatal bugs (ParseDescription method) and ignore some properties (getters that return a collection).
After all, the result is not that bad.
Has the menu & toolbar customization functionality in VS2010 been reduced?
I can't seem to be able to select an icon for an added command, nor set it to be icon-only. Previous versions of Visual Studio supported this functionality and even allowed the creation/editing of custom icons.
Is this something that has suffered as a result of the move to the WPF-authored UI or am I missing something?
Seems like this functionality was cut from Visual Studio 2010. This post has some info in the comments: Customizing Visual Studio 2010
Specifically - "Unfortunately assigning or editing icons to commands through Customize dialog is not possible in VS2010. It is one of the features got cut for lack of time. This is however something we'll consider adding back in next version."
The reply also has a longer explanation of a workaround.
As noted in the link mentioned in the answer from #Gordon Mackie JoanMiro, the REASON for the reduced functionality is that the VS Shell team migrated the entire UI (shell and command system) from Win32 to one based solely on WPF. This was a gargantuan task, I would imagine. However, a couple workarounds are now available:
You can export previously saved settings from VS 2008 and import them into VS 2010. That includes command bar customizations (as noted by #Don)
A more recent blog-post contains detailed instructions for using a new extension to VS2010 (available on Visual Studio Gallery) that allows users to change the images on the command UI. (Note that the old drag&drop customization interface is still not supported in this new extension.)
If you have custom icons, any attempt to make ANY changes to the tool bar will result in the custom icons disappearing and being replaced by text when you restart VS2010.
The only way I found to get my custom icons without text into VS2010 is to open VS2008, set up all of the tool bars the way I want, including custom icons, then export the settings (Tools| Import and Export Settings). Then open VS2010 and import those settings. Tedious, I know, but it allows me to have a down arrow icon that searches for the next instance of the word my cursor is on.
I have been trying to customize VS2010 toolbars/keyboard and what took a few minutes in previous versions takes hours now. The new system looks real pretty but is useless in practice. Apart from the fact you just can't do (like change the appearance of buttons as mentioned above) the things you can do are extremely time-consuming and annoying.
Why is it every new version of VS loses something really useful? Other examples:
VC++5 introduced a new HTML help system. Pressing F1 on a function name used to immediately show help for that function. After VC++5 getting context help became annoyingly much slower, and is still very slow (and inaccurate).
VS.Net (aka VS2002 or VC++7) had a useless bookmark system compared to VC++6. VS2010 bookmarks are better but not perfect.
VS.Net removed the search state buttons "whole word", "case sensitive" etc. These were possibly the most useful buttons ever as they quickly allowed you to see why a search may have failed.
I found a great extension: CommandingImage
It does not have an icon editor, but you can create your images as 16x16 png format (for transparency) and import it (I recommend Paint.Net)
Dave, here's how to add toolbar buttons:
1) in the IDE, find the down arrow looking thing on the far right of a toolbar and click on Add Remove Buttons, Customize
2) in the Customize window select the Menu Bar radio button then select the appropriate menu bar that you want to add a button to
3) click the "Add Command..." button
4) select the appropriate Category and Command button that you want to add, then click OK.
The command button you selected will be added to the menu bar you selected. You can move the button up or down.
I think this is what you are looking for.
Good luck!
I'm writing a COM add-in for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This add-in has some user-configurable settings (about a page full of them actually... or perhaps even more than a single page). What is the standard way of presenting these to the user? Through a custom page under Tools->Options? (how?) Under a custom button on a custom toolbar? A specific menu for the add-in?
If it were Outlook, I would add a custom property page. I was pretty confident I could easily google something similar for the other office application, but I'm obviously not searching for the right terms. Hints to improve my searching are also very welcome!
Update:
I just realized one can figure from your question you are targeting Office versions up to and including 2003 right now, as for example the tools menu is gone in 2007.
You might still find an answer regarding your question by looking at the starting point for the mentioned migration from 2003 to 2007: access to the settings for the sample 2003 add-in is located in an add-in specific sub menu of the tools menu, as shown in Figure 7.
For current and future versions of Office (i.e. 2007 and up) your first stop regarding user interface questions should be the Office Fluent User Interface Developer Portal, specifically you'll find there the '2007 Office System Document: UI Style Guide for Solutions and Add Ins'.
Its probably worth pointing out that this guide is not on par with the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines (UX Guide) by a huge margin, which is unfortunate given the almost traditional friendly competition between the Office team and other Microsoft departments in setting the next de facto UI standard for 3rd party developers.
Still one can figure out initial directions from there, for example the recommendation regarding scenarios for custom task panes as suggested by Gary clearly is at odds with your need to offer user settings, citation:
Create a custom task pane if…
Your solution needs to present data
about a document that is required to
be visible, in a non-modal fashion,
use a custom task pane. [...]
You can find a good starting point regarding your question in section Simple Migration, where the migration of a simple 2003 add-in to the current 2007 release is explored step by step from a UI design perspective; not surprisingly this add-in features settings too, hence your requirements are addressed, albeit only on the side.
Reproducing this section here would be a bit lengthy plus I'm not sure whether it would be legal to reproduce the inline images used there, just look for Figure 9 in particular to get you started.
You can take it further from there depending on your particular scenario, good luck!
I'm pretty sure you cannot add a tab to Word, Excel and PowerPoint's Tools | Options dialog. I know you cannot do that in Word before 2007 at least.
I would recommend adding a menu item for your add-in somewhere, probably under the Tools menu. I assume your add-in does not already have any other menu items? I would put it in a menu item rather than a toolbar button, since most users don't need to change "settings" all the time, so they do need to look at the button on the toolbar all the time. My screen shots here show the menu in Word with Options at the bottom, though not the actual options dialog: http://www.amosfivesix.com/timken-business-stationery
If you're worried about people finding your menu item tucked away on the Tools menu, you can have a window pop-up the first time the app is started after your add-in is installed. Have it show a picture of where the menu item is, or just explain how to get there. Lots of apps have things like that the first time they run. One of my larger Outlook add-ins does have it's own menu on the menu bar (so it's fairly easy to find) but I also have a first run window that explains what/where it is. You can see an example of that here: http://www.amosfivesix.com/timken-electronic-business-card
Gary McGill's idea for a task pane might be good as well. I don't have any experience with task panes. I'm not sure it would be appropriate for "application settings" since taks panes are more like modeless dialogs that you work with while also working with the document content. Changing your add-in's settings probably doesn't work that way.
I don't know if there is a standard way. I have only created VBA add-ins, and I do not believe it is possible to add custom pages under Tools | Options.
In an Excel Add-In I created, I put a 'Settings...' button on the Add-Ins toolbar (the Add-In created a custom toolbar during the _AddInInstall event).
But this approach of course means your add-in must have a custom toolbar (or menu).
I did a quick check on an Office installation I have access to, that has a few Add-Ins:
The Adobe PDFmaker add-in has its own top-level menu, as well as a toolbar. The menu has a 'Change conversion settings' menu item
A custom add-in (eye-share, don't know what it is) also has its own top-level menu. The menu has a 'Settings...' menu item.
Hummingbird (some sort of document management system) has menu items all over the place, but no settings dialog. The installation program probably sets the necessary config values in the registry.
So my conclusion is:
You cannot add a custom page under Tools | Options (I guess Adobe would have done this if possible).
If your add-in has a custom menu or toolbar, add a 'Settings...' button or menu item (don't know if there is a standard icon for this)
If your add-in does not have a custom menu or toolbar, I would probably add a single menu item under Tools.
If you don't want to clutter the Excel interface, you could have an external program (created in .NET or whatever) installed on the Start Menu that updates the registry. This of course requires that all relevant settings can be represented as registry values, and are to be persisted. It also means that the Add-in should always look to the registry for settings values when performing operations - not read the setting at startup and cache it in a variable.