CREATE YOUR OWN RIBBON IN MICROSOFT ACCESS

1 Relational Database Design CREATE your OWN RIBBON IN MICROSOFT ACCESS This short tutorial will show you how to CREATE your own RIBBON in ACCESS . Adding a RIBBON can be done in various ways. The steps described in this tutorial use the UsusRibbons functionality. Easy to CREATE and easy to maintain. You need MICROSOFT ACCESS to perform the steps described in the tutorial. The steps have been verified in MICROSOFT ACCESS 2007, 2010 and 2013 . Schemas used in the XML The schemas used in the tutorial refer to the 2009/07 schema. If you use Office 2007 then you should use the 2006/01 schema. Don t worry where applicable it will be pointed out to you during the steps you take.

2 Enter XML The RIBBON was first introduced in MICROSOFT Office 2007. It is part of the so called Fluent Interface ideology of MICROSOFT . This change had a great impact on the way we work with our Office applications today. No exception was made for MICROSOFT ACCESS and so users of this application also had to dive into working with the RIBBON . Besides that the old database windows was also taken away from us. Some sort of Navigation Pane became the standard to work with. For years developers could CREATE their own menubars. That was about to change. Of course the menubars would still work but you had to search for them in a RIBBON tab calles Add ins. From now on we had to get cracking at XML.

3 This section will show you how to CREATE your own RIBBON for your application. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format which is both human-readable and machine-readable. It is defined by the W3C's XML Specification[2] and by several other related specifications,[3] all of which are free open standards.[4] The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality and usability across the Internet.[5] It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for different human languages. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, it is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures[6] such as those used in web services.

4 Several schema systems exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages, while many application programming interfaces (APIs) have been developed to aid the processing of XML data. USysRibbons table It is possible to CREATE a RIBBON in various ways. The first option is to use the System table in which the info of the RIBBON is defined and stored. De second option is to build a RIBBON completely from 'VBA-code'. This section will focus on option one where we use the USys table technique. This can be done in ACCESS 2007, 2010 and 2013 .. To CREATE your own ribbons in ACCESS you need to implement certain mandatory elements in your database. The first object that is mandatory is the USysRibbons table.

5 Follow the next steps to CREATE this table. NOTE: naming conventions and datatypes should be exactly the same for a working RIBBON ! 1. CREATE a new empty (client) database and give it a appropriate name; 2. CREATE a new empty table and make sure it is in design mode. If you get a table in datasheet mode change it back to design mode. In that case you have to provide a name for it. This table should be called USysRibbons 3. CREATE the following fiels in the table Fieldname Datatype Description (optional) ID Autonumber Keyfield RibbonName Text 255 characters RibbonXML Memo ACCESS 2013 does not have the datatype Memo and Text. Instead choose Short Text and Long Text that will do the trick!

6 4. Save the table (and if not done so) call it: USysRibbons 5. Because the table has a prefix Usys ACCESS will 'see' this table as a system table. By default the ACCESS settings are not to show system tables. The average user will not see this table. For now we do need to see the table so let's make them visible. 6. Show system tables: (rightclick on mouse) XML Default Template RibbonXML Basics In the UsysRibbons table we created earlier we are going to add records with the values we need for our RIBBON . Every record in this table can be a seperate RIBBON in ACCESS . We will start of with the creation of one RIBBON just to get the basics right first.

7 For the first steps we are going to use good old Notepad. Of course you will find various XML editors on the web but how conveniant is it that you actually don't have to dowload something first to get started! So for now open Notepad and take a look at the XML lines below. Those are the lines we are going to use. Make sure you typ the lines instead of just copying them. By typing them yourself you will get a much better feeling of what you are accomplishing. However you are free to copy it if you want to. Where applicable i will tell you about the differences between the different versions of ACCESS . As you might have noticed the famous Office Button has disappeared in the 2010 and beyond versions of ACCESS .

8 From 2010 and on we have to deal with the Backstage option. Every first line for constucting a RIBBON starts with the same components they are: <customUI xmlns=" "> This line sets a reference to the Office 2007 version !! <customUI xmlns=" "> This line sets a reference to the Office 2010 (and later) versions Next we need some more mandatory elements that need to be present. < RIBBON startFromScratch="true"> true refers to creating a new clean RIBBON with no other ribbons to be shown. Only your RIBBON will show up. Set this to false and all default ribbons will show up as well. your RIBBON will be added last by default. o Hides all build in tabs including the [Add ins] tab.

9 O The Office button only shows the following options (2007): New, Open, Save as, ACCESS Options en Exit ACCESS <tabs> This is where all information will be added to CREATE your own RIBBON . You will see this in the next steps. At the end all 'Open' tags should get 'Close' tags as well. That makes it easy to CREATE a template for this! </tabs> </ RIBBON > </customUI> The complete XML could look somthing like this: <customUI xmlns=" "> < RIBBON startFromScratch="true"> <tabs> -This is where your following elements will be written - </tabs> </ RIBBON > </customUI> Important: XML is case sensitive! so be sure to check the syntax for capitalization where needed.

10 I will point that out where needed! Equally important: although it looks like a link to click on this link is just a reference link and will not provide you with any additional information about creating ribbons . It's a pointer for XML to check the XML. See image below Exercise: CREATE a tab In this exercise we are going to CREATE a RIBBON with three tabs. Next we will show what it takes to actually show our RIBBON when we start up our database. The next steps will be to expand the functionality in our RIBBON tabs. First things first: Open the database we created earlier, the one where you added the USysRibbon table. Open the table USysRibbons in datasheet mode because we are going to add a record.