Editing the TM1 Ribbon

[Steve Vincent]

I was sure that there was a thread on this, but after a decent amount of searching i can only find references to removing the entire thing or edits via regedit (which our security restricts for obvious reasons).

In XL2003, if i didn't want the "active form" toolbar all i had to do was right click and de-select it. In XL2010 that functionality seems to be missing. I know you can edit what sits on other parts of the ribbon via "customise ribbon" but the TM1 part isn't anywhere to be seen. There are significant parts of that toolbar i do not want users to see (sandbox/developer etc) and in my own setup i'd like to fill it with more useful stuff. I can't see a way to edit the XLAM without regedit, and with no access to that i seem to be stuck with an 80% useless, bigger than big ben toolbar.

Anyone got any ideas?

[Mike Cowie]

Hi Steve:

There are ways of editing the customUI ribbon XML for the tm1pRibbonX.xlam - I'm sure this is completely unsupported and use at your own risk, but if you install an application like the following:

Custom UI Editor from Open XML Developer

You can open up the ribbon add-in (be sure to have a backup, of course) with this particular app while TM1 Perspectives is shut down and you can technically tinker with the ribbon in that way. But, you need to be somewhat comfortable navigating the XML that is used to define the ribbon.

For example, if you wanted to always disable the ISB button you might be able to add this bit to the definition of that button:

Disable ISB button with Custom UI Editor

Disable ISB Button.png (12 KiB) Viewed 4498 times

Presumably you could comment out portions of the ribbon as well, if you didn't want them to appear. Again, use at your own risk since TM1 may try to refresh the status of certain buttons and bomb out if it can't find them.

There are some resources on the ribbonXML that is used here, such as a series of articles by Ken Getz (which refer to other resources, as well): Customizing the Office Fluent Ribbon

There are also other possibly more graphical/user-friendly tools for editing the ribbon like this, such as this one from Andy Pope called RibbonX Editor and I'm sure others, some of which may not be free. I've only used the Custom UI editor (not for editing the TM1 Ribbon), so I can't comment on how good/safe others are.

Again, this is more than enough rope to hang yourself - take backups and use caution/test thoroughly!

Regards,
Mike

[Steve Vincent]

Cheers Mike. Our security also bars us from installing software, but i do have elevated rights as part of my developer role so i might be able to utilise those to try and tidy up the ribbon. Loads of its functionality we completely ignore here so it's nothing but a screen hog in its installed state.

many thanks

[Oratia623]

You can see from the screenshot that Mike supplied, that the values for button properties like 'getLabel' and 'getScreenTip' are all determined by calls to the "tm1p.xla!RibbonGetLabelCall"
Given that the button names and tip-text never change, I have found that hard coding this in the ribbon XML reduces the constant chatter between the ribbon and the xla.
This vastly increases navigation speed and ribbon stability.