MS Outlook 2016 - Add custom ribbon, that has 1 button and when clicked it executes a task

Question

I've spent the last few days, trying various tutorials trying to accomplish the objective in the title. For the life of me, I keep hitting a brick wall. All of the searches return results for excel addins, or outlook.com addins.

Can someone recommend a tutorial (website, video, (step-by-step preferred) that outlines the process from start to finish?

I used to use macros, but the dread GPO disabled it so a addin looks like the next best option.

All I want to do is have a button appear on my ribbon, so I can select an e-mail, click the button and let the magic happen. If you have sample code that can at least get the custom button to display on the ribbon, I'm pretty sure I can figure out the rest.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you for reading. (if you made it this far.)

Answer 1

VBA macros can't be used for customizing the ribbon in Outlook. You need to develop a COM add-in for that. For example, it can be a VSTO based add-in. See Walkthrough: Creating Your First VSTO Add-In for Outlook.

VSTO provides two main ways for customizing the Ribbon UI (aka Fluent UI):

• Walkthrough: Creating a Custom Tab by Using the Ribbon Designer
• Walkthrough: Creating a Custom Tab by Using Ribbon XML

As you can see VSTO provides a designer for creating a custom UI quicker. You can read more about the Fluent UI in the following series of articles:

• Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 1 of 3)
• Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 2 of 3)
• Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 3 of 3)