The ribbon designer is a great tool, however it seems to have a serious flaw. The issue is that if you have already got a custom tab installed (e.g. the Team tab from Team Foundation Server), then any tab created using the designer is merged with the existing custom tab. Annoying to say the least.
The issue seems to be with the way that tab is identified to Office. The property group that defines this is ControlId, which is a little confusing. This property group contains two properties, ControlId and OfficeId.
ControlId is a drop down with 2 options : Office or Custom. This is where the confusion begins. As this is an Office addin, one would assume that the ControlId should be set to Office, and the OfficeId should be set to a distinct name. However, if you change the OfficeIdfrom TabAddIns , your custom ribbon will not appear. And if you leave it as TabAddIns, then your custom ribbon will be merged with any other custom addin that you happen to have installed, e.g. the Team Foundation "Team" menu.
In fact you must set ControlId to Custom. This in turn alters OfficeId to CustomId. You then enter your distinct name in the (Name) property. Yep this is a little strange ! This will automatically set the CustomId and therefore the tab's Id within Excel. And when it is installed, it will not merge with any existing tabs.
I think the reason for this can be explained if you export the ribbon to XML. You will see that the tab has a property of IdMso = . It seems that this can only ever be set TabAddIns. Any other setting does not work. However, if you have set the ControlId to Custom, then in the XML the tab now has a property of Id = , and this works whatever the Id is. This matches how the XML used to look under VS 2005.
I'll put this down as a strange and confusing "feature" ;)
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