RibbonButton classes -- can they be extended?

Question

I have been building a ribbon plug in for Excel. The ribbon toolbox seems extremely limited to me, you can't make even the most basic changes to it.

For example, I want to be able to tag cells with a group name. I have a menu that lists the group names, and allows you to select which groups the currently selected cells are in. I want an additional menu entry to say "Clear" to remove them from all groups. Ideally it shouldn't be set in the same type as the group names, perhaps italic and gray. However, there seems to be no way to adjust the rendering of a menu item.

To be clear I am talking about Microsoft.Office.Tools.Ribbon... rather than the windows ribbon buttons.

Normally I'd just extend the control, but these items come from a factory so there is no way to change the created type.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I spent quite some time looking for way to customize the Ribbon controls, but haven't found a way. Even simple things like setting fonts, font sizes, bold, italic is impossible from what I managed to read on the subject.

Another frustrating thing is also that you cannot reproduce some Ribbon effects that are in the core Office functionality. For example in ribbon gallery is impossible to reproduce.