Requested type library or wizard is not a VBA project

Do you use Navigation Forms in your database projects and have seen this error message?



If so, please read on to hear about my experience running into this issue and learn what I had to do to fix the problem.

After avoiding to use Navigation Forms since it's introduction with Access 2010, I recently found myself without any choice because our IT department decided to disable all custom ribbons on our network for security reasons. Please don't get me wrong, I personally don't think there's anything particularly wrong with Navigation Forms. On the contrary, I think they are a huge improvement over the old Switchboard, but I never used the Switchboard much either (only on occasions). So, when the custom ribbons came out in Access 2007, I thought it was a better use of space for a menuing system and decided to design all my user interface using custom ribbons. However, when our IT system was recently upgraded to Office 2010, my Access 2007 custom ribbons stopped working because of our new network security configuration. So, I decided to give Navigation Forms a try.

There may be other instances where the subject error message can occur, but I ran into it when I decided to use a Navigation Form with 2-Level Horizontal Tabs.



Now, please note that just by creating a Navigation Form with 2-Level Horizontal Tabs won't necessarily produce the error mentioned above. Instead, this problem may only reveal itself when you compile your project into a ACCDE file. In other words, you might not realize that there's a problem while testing your project using the full version of Access until you deploy a compiled version or your database application to your users.

What is causing this?

Interestingly enough, some people may not even run into this issue at all. What causes this problem is when you are using any VBA code behind your Navigation Form. For example, you'll run into this problem if you have a Load Event procedure to hide certain tabs depending on the user's security level or if you have an Open Event procedure to change the label captions on your Navigation Form. Unfortunately, just deleting all the codes will not be enough. The mere fact that you have the "Has Module" property set to "Yes" will also cause this problem.



So, how do I fix it?

Of course, the easy answer is to just set that property to "No." And when you do that, Access will give you this warning, which you'll need to pay close attention to:



As you can see from the bolded part of that warning message, setting the Has Module property to No will "delete" all the VBA code you have behind that form. So, if you have any code behind the form, I suggest that you save them outside of the form for future reference before you change this setting.

If you *must* have some code run behind your Navigation Form, I recommend that you use Macros instead. You can take all the VBA procedures you removed from the form and convert them into macros to be used in your Navigation Form. Using macros to execute your form logic will not produce the error that using VBA procedures does. Unfortunately, there is no utility to convert VBA into macros, so you'll have to do that process manually.

Like I said earlier, I am not sure what other situations could result in this error, but I hope the solution presented here will somehow help fix those problems as well.

Original post date: May 27, 2014