Office 2007 and RibbonIDs

Posted by admin on May 16, 2007 – 4:19 am

By now, I suspect the Office 2007 Ribbon is a bit old news.

From a developer’s point of view, it’s relatively easy to customize the ribbon via add-in code, which is really nice. And since there seems to be no dearth of examples on doing so, I won’t be wandering down that path.

For Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, things are pretty straightforward, because, as far as I can tell, there’s only one Ribbon for them.

But in Outlook, things are more complicated. The main Outlook window doesn’t even have a ribbon. But the sole parameter of the main entry callback for customizing the ribbon is:

Public function GetCustomUI(ByVal RibbonID as string) as string

so what are the possible RibbonIDs?

After a good bit of searching, I found the following table in the VSTO3CTPTutorial.doc file that identifies them all:

RibbonID	MessageClass
Microsoft.Outlook.Mail.Read	IPM.Note.*
Microsoft.Outlook.Mail.Compose	IPM.Note.*
Microsoft.Outlook.MeetingRequest.Read	IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Request or IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Canceled
Microsoft.Outlook.MeetingRequest.Send	IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Request
Microsoft.Outlook.Appointment	IPM.Appointment.*
Microsoft.Outlook.Contact	IPM.Contact.*
Microsoft.Outlook.Journal	IPM.Activity.*
Microsoft.Outlook.Task	IPM.Task.* and IPM.TaskRequest.*
Microsoft.Outlook.DistributionList	IPM.DistList.*
Microsoft.Outlook.Report	IPM.Report.*
Microsoft.Outlook.Resend	IPM.Resend.*
Microsoft.Outlook.Response.Read	IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Resp.*
Microsoft.Outlook.Response.Compose	IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Resp.*
Microsoft.Outlook.Response.CounterPropose	IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Resp.*
Microsoft.Outlook.RSS	IPM.Post.Rss
Microsoft.Outlook.Post.Read	IPM.Post.*
Microsoft.Outlook.Post.Compose	IPM.Post.*
Microsoft.Outlook.Sharing.Read	IPM.Sharing.*
Microsoft.Outlook.Sharing.Compose	IPM.Sharing.*