Adding Ribbon support to Excel COM Addin

Question

I have a MS Office COM addin written in C# (Visual Studio 2005) and uses a COM Shim dll. The addin DOES NOT use VSTO technology and supports Excel XP and higher. The addin adds a new toolbar and a menu.

The addin works fine in Excel 2007 but it is displayed in a separate tab named "AddIns" along with its toolbars and menu. I want integrate this addin with the Excel 2007 ribbon toolbar and create a new tab with groups and buttons.

I went through a number of articles and found that IRibbonExtensibility is the interface that will be used for Ribbon support. Also, the COM Shim Wizards has a new version 2.3 that supports ribbon interface.

I want to know whether it can be done and the changes that will be required in the project.

1. Currently, OfficeXP's office.dll file is used in the project (v 7.0). But the IRibbonExtensibility interface is in Office 2007's dll (v12). So I think the first thing that I need to do is to change this dll and update all reference in code. Will this dll support previous versions (backward compatible)? I dont want to break the existing functionality.
2. What will the changes in COM Shim dll?

Answer 1

I havent used OfficeXP, but have built COM AddIns against 2000, 2003 and 2007.

I recently built a COM AddIn for Office 2007 using the IRibbonExtensibility interface, with references to the v12 PIAs.

When I used this with Office 2003, I found it worked pretty well. However, my AddIns is only providing some very basic functionality and not using many calls onto the Excel objects. I adjusted the OnConnection method to set up the CommandBars only if the Applicaiton.Version was less than 12.

There were no code changes that I remember needed to switch from 2003 PIAs to 2007 PIAs. In the past have found you can switch between different versions of the PIAs with minimum effort.

James