Hi David,

>I would REALLY love to develop an interface consistent with Office 97 (icon shortcuts against menu commands and coolbars - including drop down menu buttons like Undo and Border).
>
>Are we getting a new menu/toolbar system in Visual Foxpro 6.0?

This has been one of my top questions until the online MSDN chat, because we're developing an integrated solution for law firms with Office97 and VFP5 that will use Outlook and Exchange a lot. But unfortunately, I fear the answer is *No*. I don't have here the VFP6 beta, but from what they've said they've excluded a FULL use of ActiveX for the native controls, that are still non-windowed ones.
Instead, on the VInterDev6 beta that I've installed there are the new Common Controls for VS98, which include a new toolbar control (read well, not 'coolbar') that lets you use the new transparent style for the buttons, and drop-down buttons too. It works with VFP5, but has some glitches that can be solved by creating a container subclass with a contained toolbar.
Is this enough to solve your problems ? Again, I fear not, because there's no working 'coolbar' (the rubber band) from MS that works on VFP5.

The solution ? There are two really cool ActiveX controls for 'Coolbars' : one from Sheridan and the other from DataDynamics. The first WON'T work on VFP5, and Sheridan says they are not interested in the VFP market anyway. The latter works, and very well (although there are some minor problems with menu shortcuts), so it's worth a look. We're using the 30-day trial, and if all goes well we'll order the full one soon.

The link is : http://www.datadynamics.com