That's for the reply, but I'm not sure that would let me designate my own icon for a built in, idMso, call. However, it is moot as I *finally* found the way to go to the Recent Files Open screen in the Backstage. (It worked in Word 2016 and I haven't tried it on earlier versions).

The single program line I needed was:

Application.CommandBars.ExecuteMso ("FileOpenRecentFile")

then it was a snap for me create a macro with that line in it, use my own icon and to execute it via a standard Ribbon callback called from my custom button.

Stuart