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Welcome to my brand new blog hosted on my own website and powered by WordPress. I am sure there are still a few glitches left on these pages. If you find any, please let me know and I will fix them.

This blog is mainly going to be about Microsoft Office 2007 or rather about “2007 Microsoft Office System” if you prefer the official name. As I am writing this, Microsoft has released Beta 2 to the public. If you don’t have Beta 2 on your computer yet, visit the Office preview site.
The focus of my blog posts will be on the Ribbon User Interface that Access, Excel, Outlook (partially), PowerPoint and Word have in Office 2007. Specifically, I will be blogging about customizing and extending this UI, from the point of view of a user and a developer (”RibbonX”).

I have so far come up with the following topic list. Please suggest any other topics you’d like to see covered. The list is not in order of how I am going to cover it. Please let me also know which topics you’d like to see first.
User view:

• Customization in Office 2007 - what can I do?
• The QAT
• What if I want to change the ribbon itself?
• RibbonCustomizer Add-In

Developer view:

• Overview of the new UI customization model (”RibbonX”)
• “Hello World” in Access, Excel, PowerPoint and Word from a COM Add-In using .NET (C# and VBA.NET)
• “Hello World” in Access, Excel, PowerPoint and Word from a COM Add-In using VB6
• “Hello World” in Outlook from a COM Add-In
• “Hello World” in Excel, PowerPoint and Word with VBA
• “Hello World” in Access with VBA
• Developing COM add-ins for Office 2007 and earlier versions using .NET
• Developing COM add-ins for Office 2007 and earlier versions using VB6
• Ribbon UI Style Issues
• Overview of Ribbon elements
• Customizing Microsoft tabs, groups and controls of the ribbon
• Dynamic Ribbon - hiding & showing of groups and controls dynamically
• Dynamic Ribbon - create your own custom contextual tab
• Dynamic Ribbon - trigger a tab switch

I will be on vacation until Sunday. In the meantime, check out the following resources from Microsoft:

• Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog (the UI “bible”)
• 2007 Office System: How Do I ScreenCasts
• Customizing the Office (2007) Ribbon User Interface for Developers (Part 1 of 2)
• Customizing the Office (2007) Ribbon User Interface for Developers (Part 2 of 2)
• 2007 Office System Document: UI Style Guide for Solutions and Add Ins
• 2007 Office System Document: List of Control IDs