Microsoft Access 2010 Bible

Part IV: Professional Database Development

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FIGURE 29.3

The Office ribbon resizes controls to accommodate the width of the Access window.

One final benefit of the ribbon to developers is that you can compose the XML for ribbons in any

qualified text editor. You don’t have to use a development tool such as Visual Studio to compose

ribbon XML. In this chapter, we use the Microsoft Web Developer Express, a free download from

Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/. This tool has several advantages over using

a plain text editor such as Windows Notepad. In the Visual Web Developer editor, XML is dis-

played with different colors signifying XML tags, keywords, and identifiers. Also, Visual Web

Developer is smart about XML, and flags poorly formed XML statements with the familiar red

squiggles Microsoft Word places under misspelled words.

A complete explanation of Visual Web Developer Express is beyond the scope of this chapter, but

because Access does not include a qualified XML editor, you need access to an external tools such

as Visual Web Developer for composing your ribbon XML. Because Visual Web Developer is a free

download, and because it does such a fine job of composing XML statements, it is the ideal tool for

Access developers to use when developing ribbon XML.

Hopefully, Microsoft will include an XML editor or a drag-and-drop ribbon designer in a future

Access version. In the meantime, we have to manually create the XML for custom ribbons.

Because the XML syntax is used to create and customize Access ribbons, the exact same XML syn-

tax is used by all the Office applications. Also, because you compose XML in a file outside of

Access, it is possible to work on a ribbon without disturbing users working with the application.

As you will soon see, updating the XML driving an Access ribbon is a relatively simple process and

does not require importing or exporting database objects.

At some point, Microsoft will inevitably provide a developer interface for creating and customizing

Access ribbons. It is safe to assume that this tool will be made available as an Access add-in and

will provide the same or similar functionality as Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express.

Therefore, the sections of this chapter describing how to compose the XML for Access ribbons will

be applicable even after a ribbon customization tool becomes available from Microsoft.