title: How to set default value in dropdown control for Excel custom ribbon control
body: <p>I have created a custom Fluent Ribbon interface for Excel 2010 which includes a dropdown. Relevant XML code (simplified):</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;dropDown id="chooseFilter" showLabel="true" label="Filter" onAction="filterSelected" &gt; 
      &lt;item id="Filter1" label="Filter 1" /&gt; 
      &lt;item id="Filter2" label="Filter 2" /&gt; 
  &lt;/dropDown&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When the ribbon is loaded, no value is selected - the dropdown looks empty.</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wp3Zr.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>I would like the first item to be selected by default - but could not find any documentation describing how to do it. I looked at the <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924079(v=office.12).aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MSDN documentation</a> for the control but it did not cover this case. I tried various permutations of "HTML-like" statements, but they were all rejected by the custom UI editor as invalid.  Examples of the things I tried:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;item id="Filter1" label="Filter 1" selected="selected" /&gt; 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Error message: <code>The 'selected' attribute is not declared</code></p>
  
  <p>I tried other attributes like <code>selectedItem</code>, <code>value</code>, and <code>selected</code> in the <code>&lt;dropDown .../&gt;</code> declaraction, but nothing seemed to work.</p>
  
  <p>If only I had the right bit of documentation this would be trivial, but even the full Microsoft "documentation" for the Ribbon customization (found <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=2&amp;cad=rja&amp;ved=0CDUQFjAB&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fdownload.microsoft.com%2Fdownload%2FD%2F3%2F3%2FD334A189-E51B-47FF-B0E8-C0479AFB0E3C%2F%5BMS-CUSTOMUI%5D.pdf&amp;ei=poU7UofrGPj64AOzioGYBg&amp;usg=AFQjCNHf8e09QfbqauEPIHmTISmeEeKtLw&amp;sig2=G5Nc7XNbh1SOBWh_9JW6Fw&amp;bvm=bv.52434380,d.dmg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a> was silent on the subject. </p>
  
  <p>I even tried to see if the schema located at <a href="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/01/customui" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/01/customui</a> might be "human readable", but when I tried to open it in the browser, I was told it was unavailable. Maybe there is a trick...</p>
  
  <p>So I turn to the combined wisdom of this forum. You can see from my Q/A ratio that I don't do this very often...</p>
  
  <p>How do I modify my XML so that the ribbon opens with an arbitrary item selected in the drop-down control? I will settle for it being the first item - but "any item I choose to declare in my XML" would be preferable.</p>
  
  <p>I am looking for an XML solution for this - would prefer not to have to add <code>onLoad</code> VBA code or other VBA trick. How hard can it be, right?...</p>