I’m expecting that the answer to this question is no, but I thought it would be worth finding out for sure. I know that an interface option similar to the Ribbon UI in Microsoft Office has only just made it to users. In my day job I primarily work with a custom application built on top of Microsoft Excel with quite a bit of VBA and more recently a custom interface built using Microsoft’s MS-CUSTOMUI capabilties. As an exclusive Linux user at home I started wondering the other day if it would be even remotely possible to open our Workbook with LibreOffice. MS-CUSTOMUI allows users to create custom application interfaces implementing standard control groups or custom control items using standardized objects via an xml specification. Custom interface objects can then be handled in VBA using callback functions. It is actually a pretty elegant solution once you know what you are doing.There are a few different tools out there for creating a custom Ribbon based UI, but I have done all of my work by hand writing my XML due to restrictions on untrusted files/applications.
Transferring the workbook for testing isn’t a small task due to my work environment so I figured I’d ask some questions before wasting my time. So is this implemented at all? Assuming it has not, what sort of roadblocks would prevent someone from implementing these capabilities?
Here are a few relevant MSDN links for MS-CUSTOMUI.
XML Markup Specification: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313070(v=office.12).aspx
Breakdown of Elements: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd926139(v=office.12).aspx