4 posts tagged with "ribbon"

In this article, we'll see how, very easily, we can load an Excel range into a ribbon and display it inside a dropdown.

The idea is to provide a list of values in a ribbon but to not have to hardcode values in the list but, just, to link to a range, anywhere in your workbook.

I've used this technique in many of my Excel application's (i.e. Excel having VBA code).

For this blog post, we'll create a list of periods (YYYYMM) in a worksheet and load that list in our custom ribbon.

In this way, we could offer a nicer user experience by proposing a list and executing, for example, a query to a database to obtain the data for this period (or anything else).

Imagine you can execute a query like SELECT customer_id, first_name, last_name, email FROM customers ORDER BY last_name ASC; in your Excel sheet and that Excel will connect your Microsoft SQL Server database, run the query there, get the result and put the data directly in your sheet. Would be nice, no?

Imagine your sheet has already a nice layout with colors, titles having filters enabled and f.i. has a name (like rngMyCustomers). It would be nice if the updated data still keep all the layouts and just extends the name; no?

Stop imagining, it's just so easy!

Imagine you had to make a call to a SOAP web service in Excel? For example, to validate the VAT number you have been given before carrying out some processing.

You will call the URL that corresponds to the web service you want, but you will also need to pass a number of parameters in XML format so that the service knows what you want to do.

We'll learn, in this blog post, how to validate a European VAT number using the VIES VAT number validation SOAP web service.

The VBA code we will see in this article can be used as a skeleton for your future development.

In this post, we'll learn how to create a ribbon (i.e. a toolbar) in Microsoft Excel.

We'll create our custom ribbon for an Excel file, save the ribbon in the file so our users will have a nice and intuitive interface to work with our worksheet.