MS-Excel / General Formatting

Creating a Dialog Launcher

You've probably seen the small button that appears in the lower-right corner of some Ribbon groups. In Word's Home tab, for example, the button appears in the Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, and Styles groups. In each case, clicking the button opens a dialog box. In the Font group, for example, clicking the button opens the Font dialog box.

This button is called a dialog box launcher, and you can add them to your custom Ribbon groups. Your custom dialog box launchers can open any of the application's built-in dialog boxes or a custom dialog box that you've built in the Visual Basic Editor.

You begin with an empty <dialogBoxLauncher> element:

<dialogBoxLauncher>
</dialogBoxLauncher>

Between these elements, you add a single <button> element:

<dialogBoxLauncher>
    <button id="dlLaunchInsertHyperlinkDialog"
	onAction="Module1.dlLaunchInsertHyperlinkDialog_OnAction" />
</dialogBoxLauncher>

Here's the code for the LaunchInsertHyperlinkDialog macro:

Sub dlLaunchInsertHyperlinkDialog_OnAction(ByVal control As IRibbonControl)
    Dialogs(wdDialogInsertHyperlink).Show
End Sub
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In this tutorial:

  1. Creating Custom Controls
  2. Common Control Attributes
  3. Creating a Button
  4. Creating a Menu
  5. Creating a Split Button
  6. Creating a Check Box
  7. Creating a Toggle Button
  8. Creating a Drop-Down List
  9. Creating a Gallery
  10. Creating a Combo Box
  11. Creating a Dialog Launcher
  12. Working with Ribbon Commands at Runtime
  13. Initializing Controls
  14. Resetting Controls
  15. Getting and Changing Control Values