Add buttons and other controls to Office toolbar
in VSTO: Outlook Excel, Word, PowerPoint

Add-in Express™
for Microsoft® Office and VSTO

You can use any .NET controls on your toolbars

For Excel, Word, PowerPoint 2003, Outlook 2003 and 2007 Add-in Express delivers a great feature that allows using any .NET controls on your toolbars without any coding. You can use buttons, grids, treeviews, lists, edit boxes and any 3rd-party controls on floating or docked toolbars. To do this, just follow the step-by-step instruction below. Please find more details about using .NET controls on Office toolbars on the Microsoft Office Toolbar pages.

Five steps to add .NET controls to your toolbars

1. Add a control adapter to the ADXModule

On the Toolbox, Add-in Express places several special components that support .NET controls on toolbars of the appropriate Office application. There is an Outlook-specific component called ADXOutlookControlAdapter. The Outlook control adapter makes possible to interact between Add-in Express and Microsoft Outlook. So, you add the Outlook control adapter to your ADXModule.

Adding host-specific control adapter.

2. Add a toolbar component to the ADXModule

Using the corresponding command of the ADXModule you add a new toolbar component and customize it via the properties window. In this case we use the Add Explorer Command Bar command that creates a toolbar component for the Outlook Explorer window.

Adding an Explorer command bar component.

3. Add a .NET control to the ADXModule

Then, you can place a .NET control on the ADXModule. For example, you can place DateTimePicker. Customize your picker via the Properties window.

Adding a .NET control onto the add-in module designer.

4. Add an Advanced Control to the Controls collection of the toolbar component

Then, you add an Advanced Control to the Controls collection of the toolbar component.

Adding a special control - a placeholder for the custom .NET control.

5. Bind the Advanced ADX Control to the control

Then, you bind the Advanced Control to your .NET control as it's shown on the picture below.

Binding the AdxAdvancedControl to the custom .NET control.

Finally, run your add-in and find your toolbar.

A custom .NET control is added onto the command bard.

Please see the Toolbar Controls for Microsoft Office pages for more information about using .NET controls on Office toolbars and placing any buttons on Outlook toolbar.

See Also