Office 2013, Office 2010, Windows 7, Office 2007 style Ribbon Control for VS.NET
DotNetBar Suite includes fully featured Office 2013, Office 2010, Windows 7 and Office 2007 style Ribbon Control for your Windows Forms (WinForms) applications. We support all required Office Applications User Interface design guidelines elements and many optional elements as well to provide you with the most comprehensive Office style Ribbon Control.
Latest release of DotNetBar includes Office 2013 style Ribbon:
Office 2013 style Backstage Application Menu:
DotNetBar Ribbon includes color scheme generator which allows you to generate as many color schemes as you want by simply setting one color:
What is Ribbon Control?
Office 2007 introduced the Ribbon as a core component of the new user interface experience. Ribbon is the one and only one place to look for functionality in a product. Ribbon replaces the many entry points of toolbar and menu hierarchy with the one consolidated entry place. Instead of looking through large number of toolbars and cascading menus, you can look into the single place and drastically reduce the scope of your search for application commands. Through the testing and research it has been revealed that people discover how to do things easier and are more inclined to explore the UI looking for better ways to get things done using the Ribbon.
Partial list of DotNetBar Ribbon Control features:- Office 2013 styling with Backstage Application Menu
- Office 2010 styling with new Application Button and Windows 7 and Windows Vista Glass support
- Office 2010 style Backstage Application Menu
- Windows 7 Styling
- Visual Studio 2010 like Styling
- Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) support with full customization and placement control
- Black, Silver and Blue color schemes included
- Office 2010, Windows 7 and Office 2007 Style Application Button
- Office 2010, Windows 7 and Office 2007 Style form support
- Office 2010, Windows 7 and Office 2007 Style popup Galleries
- Integrated support for Contextual Tabs concept
- Predefined color schemes for tabs and tab groups
- Office 2010, 2007 style KeyTips (accelerator keys) both single key and multi-key are fully supported
- You can create Drop-down menus, even drop-down toolbars are fully supported
- You can add any standard DotNetBar items to the RibbonControl header
- One or more tabs can belong to Tab Groups. Tab groups are used to visually group similar tab commands. Usually they are used for contextual tabs that are shown based on active selection and disappear once something else is selected
- Full control over Tab Group header is provided. It can be hidden, font changed, height changed and appearance completely customized through ElementStyle appearance object (in Office 2003 style)
- You can add any VS.NET Windows Forms control to a Ribbon tabs.
- Keyboard Shortcuts are fully supported as well
- Windows Vista Glass support
- Custom Office 2010, Windows 7 and Office 2007 style color scheme generator based on single color
- Intelligent resizing of buttons on the Ribbon to fit the screen size
Latest version of DotNetBar adds unique Visual Studio 2010 theme:
Screen-shot of our Office 2010 style Ribbon sample project running on Windows 7 with Glass enabled:
Backstage Application Menu
DotNetBar Ribbon Control includes support for Office 2010 style Backstage Application Menu. Following screen-shot's show sample Backstage implementation you can experience in RibbonPad sample:
Screen-shot of our Windows 7 style Ribbon sample project running on Windows 7 with Glass enabled:
Screen-shot from Office 2007 style Ribbon sample project:
Here is screen-shot from sample project that we ship with our Ribbon control with Office 2007 Black style:
Ribbon control with Office 2007 Silver style:
Included is also Office 2007 Blue style as well. Here is the screen-shot:
We include custom style color scheme generator based on single color and style you choose. Here is an example:
Anatomy of DotNetBar Ribbon Control
RibbonBar
One of the controls that is used to create fully functional Ribbon is RibbonBar control. RibbonBar control is used to group commands by functional area. Picture below shows main parts of RibbonBar control when it is displayed in design-time:
Partial list of features:
- RibbonBar can contain all DotNetBar standard light-weight items, like buttons, labels, combo-box, etc.
- You can add any .NET control to RibbonBar
- Automatic size management
- Layout of items added to RibbonBar can be made as complex or as simple as you like. You can add and nest containers that layout content either horizontally or vertically
- Title bar appearance and size is fully customizable through our standard ElementStyle appearance class
- Background of the control is also fully customizable
- Using Dialog Launcher button you can display dialog with more commands etc. Of course you can hide this button if not needed...
RibbonControl
RibbonBar control allows you to group commands based on functional area. RibbonControl ties everything together into one coherent User Interface presentation. With RibbonControl you can create top-level commands, like File menu, Save or New...Ribbon control fully support Contextual Tabs concept. To reduce number of visible commands and to simply your user interface, default tabs for your application should only have commands which are not specific to any particular view/object i.e they contain default commands that are always available. Whenever certain view or object is selected, Contextual Tab should be displayed to provide commands specific just for that state. As soon as context changes Contextual Tab should disappear and be out of the way.
Here is screenshot of Ribbon Control with couple of different items added and two Ribbon Bars:
Super Tooltips
One of great additions in Office 2007 are Super Tooltips which provide much more information about current commands or control than standard old style tooltips. Below is picture of our SuperTooltip component in action:
Super Tooltips are defined by header, body text with image and footer with footer image. While default look and feel of Super Tooltip control matches Office 2007 we went further and added 18 color schemes so you can choose right color scheme that best reflects the type of information you are providing to your user. This is one of the colors:
Choosing right color is simply single property setting, which you can pick right in the Super Tooltip designer:
And you can also utilize body image in your tooltips to better illustrate result of certain commands like below so user do not have to click certain command to find out where it leads to:
Partial list of features:
- Complete Office 2007 like appearance and functionality
- Provides tooltips for any .NET Control
- 18 predefined color schemes for tooltips
- Complete control over visual appearance
- Super Tooltips are created using handy design-time editor, no code required
- Extensibility interface to provide tooltips for any kind of object
- Template tooltip support
Screenshots above use icons from our Professional Icon Pack and Essential Icon Pack.
To jump start your usage of DotNetBar and Ribbon control with VS.NET we help you with Movie Tutorials so you can get up to speed and running our components in minutes.
