Ribbon Icons

You can assign a macro to a custom tab on the Ribbon or a custom button on the Quick Access toolbar in Excel 2013 and then run it by clicking that custom button.

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To assign a macro to a custom group on a custom Ribbon tab, you follow these steps:

  1. Choose File→Options and then click the Customize Ribbon tab in the Excel Options dialog box (or press Alt+FTC).

    Excel displays the Customize Ribbon pane in the Excel Options dialog box.

  2. Click Macros in the Choose Commands From drop-down list box on the left.

    Excel lists the names of all the macros created in the current workbook in the Choose Commands From list box.

  3. Click the name of the custom group on the custom tab to which you want to add the macro in the Main Tabs list box on the right.

    If you haven’t already created a custom tab and group for the macro or need to create a new one, follow these steps:

    1. Click the New Tab button at the bottom of the Main Tabs list.

      Excel adds both a New Tab (Custom) and New Group (Custom) item to the Main Tabs list while at the same time selecting the New Group (Custom) item.

    2. Click the New Tab (Custom) item you just added to the Main Tabs.

    3. Click the Rename button at the bottom of the Main Tabs list box and then type a display name for the new custom tab before you click OK.

    4. Click the New Group (Custom) item right below the custom tab you just renamed.

    5. Click the Rename button and then type a display name for the new custom group before you click OK.

  4. In the Choose Commands From list box on the left, click the name of the macro you want to add to the custom group now selected in the Main Tabs list box on the right.

  5. Click the Add button to add the selected macro to the selected custom group on your custom tab and then click the OK button to close the Excel Options dialog box.

After you add a macro to the custom group of a custom tab, the name of the macro appears on a button sporting a generic icon (a programming diagram chart) on the custom tab of the Ribbon. Then, all you have to do to run the macro is click this command button.

To assign a macro to a custom button on the Quick Access toolbar, follow these steps:

  1. Click the Customize Quick Access Toolbar button at the end of the Quick Access toolbar and then click More Commands on its drop-down menu.

    Excel opens the Excel Options dialog box with the Quick Access Toolbar tab selected.

  2. Freedom fighters 2 soldiers of liberty pc free download.utorent. Click Macros in the Choose Commands From drop-down list box.

    Excel lists the names of all the macros created in the current workbook in the Choose Commands From list box.

  3. Click the name of the macro to add to a custom button on the Quick Access toolbar in the Choose Commands From list box and then click the Add button.

  4. Click OK to close the Excel Options dialog box.

After you close the Excel Options dialog box, a custom button sporting a generic macro icon appears on the Quick Access toolbar. You can choose a different icon by clicking the Rename button below the Customize the Ribbon box. To see the name of the macro assigned to this custom macro button as a ScreenTip, position the mouse pointer over the button. To run the macro, click the button.

by Philipp Stiefel, originally published April 15th, 2019
last updated April 15th, 2019


I’m not a graphics designer and feel challenged to create custom icons for my Applications. So, when I create custom Ribbons for my Access applications, it is an obvious idea to use icons available in the Microsoft Office Suite for the buttons in the Ribbon.

Advantages of the built-in Ribbon Icons

Those icons are automatically available and visually similar to the user experience from the Office Suite itself. As per my understanding of the Microsoft Office Software License Terms, they can be used in custom Office applications free of charge.

It’s very easy to use these icons in a custom ribbon. You just need to include the imageMso attribute and assign it a valid imageMso identifier in the XML definition for a button in the Ribbon and the icon identified by that imageMso will automatically be displayed as button icon. – Simple and convenient.

Well, there is just one minor inconvenience. – Finding a suitable icon for the functionality behind each button.

Finding an icon and imageMso in the Office Application

It is possible to use the Customize the Ribbon dialog in each Office Application to browse the list of available commands and their icons. The idMso (identical to the imageMso) will be displayed in the tooltip when hoovering over any command. – But for me, the icons on that list are simply to small (16x16px) to decide if an icon is matching my requirements. Additionally, you cannot see if the icon will be available in a native 32x32px resolution. So, I do not like this approach to select an icon.

Add-Ins and sample applications

More sophisticated are several add-ins and sample applications available freely available for download. Those create galleries in the ribbon to display all the icons available in the application. Most notably Gunter Avenius’ “SampleRibbon3' database specifically for Microsoft Access. – This is much better to inspect individual icons. However, I’m a picky customer and do not like the usability of having to expand gallery after gallery to view all the icons.

imageMso Gallery PDF

Rather than the above-mentioned approaches to select an icon and find the corresponding imageMso, I would prefer a web page or similar document with all icons that I can just scroll through. – Unfortunately, it seems such a document doesn’t exist.

Well, with no such document to my liking available, I just had to create it myself.

  • I imported the imageMso Table published by Microsoft into an Access table,
  • used the Commandbars.GetImageMso-Method to retrieve an IPictureDisp object (interface) for each of the imageMso from the table, …
  • and used the SavePicGDIPlus function from the mossTools GDI+ module to save each icon as file.
  • The final step was creating a report with the imageMso from the table and the matching file and exporting this to a PDF.

The result is now available for Download: Microsoft-Office-2010-imageMso-Gallery.pdf

Please note: All icons in that document are copyrighted by Microsoft. Their use as a quick reference for Microsoft Office developers and as documentation about a Microsoft product is allowed use of Microsoft copyrighted content. – You do not obtain any rights to use these icons just by downloading the document.

There are some empty spaces in the Gallery where it was not possible to extract the icon. – I cannot say what exactly was causing this, yet.

The icons in the gallery were extracted from Microsoft Office 2010. I will probably create other versions of this gallery PDF for newer versions of Microsoft Office soon.

Practical considerations when choosing icons

Some icons in the gallery PDF are displayed in very poor quality in 32x32px resolution. This is because they are only available as 16x16px icons and where scaled up to the larger size. Obviously, you should not use these if you are looking for a 32x32 icon.

Beyond the technical limitations, think of semantics! All these icons are included in Office to represent a Microsoft Office feature. They already got a meaning! Depending on the icon, your user might know its meaning within Microsoft Office. So, take good care not use any icon in your application for a feature that is very different from or even contradicting to the Office feature the icon is used for.

Example: Using one of the Insert Chart icon from Word is certainly suitable to open a form in your Access application displaying a chart of some data. In contrast, using the Insert Page Break icon for a feature in your application to merge two documents together, would be a poor choice. Just looking at the icon could potentially justify using it for that purpose, but the user will most likely know it for meaning something very different.


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