Chapter 7: Protecting Your Database with Menus and Toolbars

Overview

Toolbars and menus allow Access users and developers flexible access to all the built-in menu items and, indirectly, to any objects in your database. Though this flexibility is good for a developer's productivity, it is not necessarily so good when it is available to the users of your database. In my experience, most users are interested in software that makes their job easier. Toolbars and menus bulging with developer options (such as the Design View and Database Window commands) probably do not assist in that aim. In addition, if users are technologically competent, they may be tempted to alter the programming objects of your database. Therefore, it is important that you learn how to use both toolbars and menus to set up a good user interface and to protect your database at the same time.

This chapter teaches you first how to build menus and toolbars. Included are plenty of pictures of all the tricky graphical steps that are required. Once you understand how to build toolbars, you will then learn how to apply those toolbars to your database using either form and report properties or the Access startup options. If you combine these skills, you will have a database that is both simple to use and hard for most users to crack. In addition, because users will not see the developer-specific toolbar and menu commands, there will be little visual incentive for your users to wander about your application. To conclude the discussions, the chapter shows you how you can permanently disable the developer-specific commands on end-users' computers.

The demonstration material for this chapter includes a number of forms and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) examples:

• A form to change the default toolbar and shortcut menu for all forms.

• A form to change the default toolbar and shortcut menu for all reports .

• A form to disable developer- related commands in the built-in menus.

• Code to find all the custom menus and toolbars in a database.

• Code to find all the menu items on a menu.

Note  

To find the demonstration material, open the download database for your version of Access ”for example, grMAP97.mdb ”and select Chapter 7.