Screen coordinates of a Ribbon control

Question

Does anybody know how to get the screen coordinates of a Ribbon control. for example the coordinates of the Adress book button.

Answer 1

Hello,

I guess you means the built-in ribbon controls. Unfortunately, as Cindy said in this thread, we cannot access Ribbon controls of office applications directly by using object model. So here, I think it is not possible to get the coordinates of a Ribbon control through object model. 

In office 2007, Ribbon is designed to allow us to add/invisible controls by using Ribbon Designer or Ribbon XML. In Ribbon XML, we could access built-in group/control using idMso value.

Here are some resource which may interest you:
Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Control IDs of 2007 Office system: 2007 Office System Document: Lists of Control IDs.

Best regards,
Bessie

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Answer 2

Hi Bessie

One additional thought on this, that occurred to me as I read your reply (no idea why not, sooner). Unfortunately, I'm getting ready to travel again, and things are topsy-turvey here, so I can't look into it myself.

Possibly, the Ribbon Accessibility would give some information on screen co-ordinates. I've never used it, so I don't have all the properties and capabilities "at hand", but it does offer a possibility for "selecting" a particular Ribbon tab programmatically. So maybe there's something that will let one get screen co-ordinates? Worth taking a look, anyway.

 

• Ribbon Accessibility
  • Tony Jollans article: http://wordarticles.com/Shorts/RibbonVBA/RibbonVBADemo.htm
  • Blog article on which that bases:  http://blogs.msdn.com/pranavwagh/archive/2008/01/21/how-to-switch-ribbon-tab-programmatically-looks-simple.aspx
  • MSDN documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb404170.aspx

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Cindy Meister, VSTO/Word MVP

Answer 3

Yes, you can do it via the Accesibility interface. If you get a reference to an IAccessible object for the Ribbon element (see references quoted by Cindy) you are interested in - and it is Visible, then you can use .accLocation to get the co-ordinates. One point to note is that you will get Pixels and may want Points, but you can use the PixelsToPoints function to convert.

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Enjoy, Tony

Answer 4

Hello Cindy,

Before I did not know there was such a method as you mentioned. Now I have got it. Thanks for pointing it out.

Best regards,
Bessie

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