Hide Options Menu from Backstage

There have been a couple of times when users in the forums asked how to hide the backstage menu, specifically Options, to prevent their users from making adjustments to the database settings. When a database application is executed in a runtime environment, most of the menus are disabled; but sometimes, that is not enough to protect the database from curious users. One possible approach is to create a custom Ribbon that manipulates the Backstage to hide these menus.

Figure 1 shows a typical Access 2010 File Menu (Backstage) with all the choices available.



Figure 2 shows what the File Menu might look like after applying the custom Ribbon that manipulates the Backstage.



To achieve the result shown in Figure 2, just include the following XML snippet within your custom Ribbon.

<backstage>
  <button idMso="FileSave" visible="false"/>
  <button idMso="SaveObjectAs" visible="false"/>
  <button idMso="FileSaveAsCurrentFileFormat" visible="false"/>
  <button idMso="FileOpen" visible="false"/>
  <button idMso="FileCloseDatabase" visible="false"/>
  <tab idMso ="TabInfo" visible="false"/>
  <tab idMso ="TabRecent" visible="false"/>
  <tab idMso ="TabNew" visible="false"/>
  <tab idMso ="TabPrint" visible="false"/>
  <tab idMso ="TabShare" visible="false"/>
  <tab idMso ="TabHelp" visible="false"/>
  <button idMso="ApplicationOptionsDialog" visible="false"/>
  <button idMso="FileExit" visible="false"/>
</backstage>

To see this in action, please download the demo file here. As usual, I would appreciate any comments or feedback. Thank you.

Original post date: September 30, 2014