Page 391 - Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Programming Inside Out

Part 5: Manipulating Excel Objects

Chapter 17

Command Bars

Identifying Parts of the Menu System . 365 Command Bar Controls . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

The ability to manipulate menus in Microsoft Excel is very important when creating custom
add-ins. By trapping the appropriate events in an add-in, the add-in can automatically add
the appropriate menu items, making the add-in appear to be a standard part of Excel. In this
chapter, you’ll learn about the various objects associated with menus and toolbars and how to
add new menu items, modify existing menu items, and undo the changes your application
made, to restore Excel to its unmodified state.

Identifying Parts of the Menu System

Microsoft has developed a very flexible object model that combines menus, command but-
tons, combo boxes, and pop-up menus into a single extendable system. (See Figure 17-1.)
This system separates the visual presentation of the choices to the user from the underlying
hierarchical structure menus and buttons, which simplifies the development process.

Worksheet object

PivotTables collection

PivotTable object

PivotCache object

PivotFields collection
(Also: ColumnFields,
DataFields, HiddenFields,
PageFields, RowFields,
VisibleFields, CalculatedFields
collections)

PivotField object

PivotItems collection

PivotItem object
Figure 17-1. The CommandBar set of objects gives VBA programmers a lot of flexibility to
integrate their applications into Excel.

365