I'm facing an issue using Microsoft.Office.Tools.Ribbonin my outlook add-in. I want to be able to implement custom colours onto the ribbon to match the theme of of the product. Here is a side by side comparison of something that i'd want to achieve, I'd also like to change the text to white.
From what I can see there is no properties that will allow me to change this from within the designer and I cannot find anyone who has attempted to change these colors.
Can't do that - the color of the ribbon is determined by the Office theme.
Related
When I found out that I couldn't control the expanding/collapsing of the form regions, it made me sad. I decided to look into controlling how much the form pops out. This has made me sadder still. It seems that while I can control the height, the user won't be able to set the height higher than what I set it to. I couldn't find a height property that controls just how far the region is set without changing the actual height of the form. I'm guessing it's somewhere in the this.OutlookFormRegion, but I haven't had any luck. Any direction towards solving this would be very much appreciated. Thanks.
Did you try to use the Form property of the FormRegion class to set up the required properties?
There are a lot of limitations exist with form regions. The Creating Outlook Form Regions section in MSDN describes form regions in depth.
I'd suggest using Advanced Outlook Form Regions instead. They allow to manage the form in the way you need - hide/show, collapse, change the size and layout at runtime and etc.
Another approach is to subclass an Outlook window and inject your own custom form. See Adjacent Windows In Outlook and Creating Adjacent Windows In Outlook sample project.
If your FormRegionType is Adjoining, after changing to your form region's e.g. Height property, call this.OutlookFormRegion.Reflow() to request that Outlook redo form layout. At least that works well for me in Outlook 2013.
I've been reading through a few posts, and from as far as I can tell, it is possible to change to color of the entire application bar so it doesn't use the default light/dark themes.
However, I'm writing an app where it would be convenient for the color of a single app bar button to change, i.e. On press, colour = default magenta, and it remains like this untill it has been clicked again.
I have a feeling that this isn't possible, and I'll have to rely on using various images to describe what's going on.
So I'm wondering if there is a solution that doesn't involve doing this?
afaik, IconUri is your only way of doing it. The background/foreground color of the whole app bar can be changed as a whole, not the individual buttons.
p.s. it is not recommended to change the colors of app bar buttons without a compelling reason. (for UI design guidelines, UX, power consumption reasons etc.)
I'm experimenting with some custom ribbons in excel, and once of the behaviors I want to try and achieve is to mimic the built-in excel ribbon disabled/enabled states. I.e. If I'm viewing a ChartSheet or if I'm in edit mode, most of the ribbon tabs/buttons grey out.
Is there a way I can read the enabled states off something like the Chart's Ribbon Tab group?
In my research, I haven't been able to find something that does this. The closest thing I've found is overriding the existing ribbons and encasing them in your own custom controls using the "startFromScratch" value, but this feature is more for me to control the visibility of built in tabs, which I don't need.
Thanks
i want to show a color dialog that only displays custom colors and no basic colors or any other color. How can I do this? Is it even possible?
how can I hide the basic colors section in this dialog box and only show the custom colors section?
It is a pre-baked dialog, built into Windows. Exact same one you see used in MSPaint's Edit Colors command for example. These dialogs are exposed by Windows to help programmers provide a consistent UI to their users. They'll learn to use it in one program and know how to use it in any other. OpenFileDialog and PrintDialog are other examples. No, you can't change it, that defeats the point.
Creating your own color dialog isn't terribly difficult. You can get inspiration from this magazine article
we can change the background of buttons and menu items n other UI components etc but is there a way to also change the background image for hover, pressed and other states
I do not think that is a good idea as a standard guideline for user interfaces has been adopted. Think what would happen if the user made a system setting change for the width of a window frame, or the border for the icons, or even worse, apply a theme that makes your user interface pretty glarish as a result of the perception of the eyes of the user, this can have a knock-on effect - the user will end up not using your application as a result.
It would be prudence to just leave the natural colours of buttons etc as defined by the system settings such as gray buttons, white background on text boxes etc. Then later on, once the winform application is accomplished, then find out by asking the users for their feedback on the layout and colouring schemes.
The best advice is to leave it alone, because by chance, a user will have their customised settings for graphics display, larger fonts (instead of 96dpi, could have extra large fonts).
The place to look for this is in:
Right click on the desktop
A popup menu appears, select properties and click on it.
A dialog box will appear, now click on the settings tab page.
It is on that tab page the font sizes, themes, borders and a whole host of customizations can take place.
Be wisse and practice safe caution here as I wouldn't go too far in making the application interface a colour playground as I have mentioned above. If you stick to my opinion of it, the application will be 'neutral' on the grounds that it will work with many themes and user settings as possible.
Anything is possible.
Override OnMouseHover, OnMouseEnter/Leave, OnPaint on the custom buttons... ;)