Disable user from Design View

[sophannaly]

Hi,

I would like to disable user from going to design view. I have a macro call showRibbon but I don't want to run it because it will hide all ribbon, then in my continuous form, user can't select the record and select deletes record from home button.

Can anybody point me out on how to hide all these ribbon and allow user to delete record in continuous form?

Best regards,
Sophanna

[Seth Schrock]

You could add buttons to your form that would perform the necessary task of deleting the record or anything else you need.

Note that just because you hide the ribbon bar, doesn't mean that the user can't still get into design view. For example, in Access 2010, the keyboard shortcut of Ctl+Enter will open the selected form, report, table, macro, or module in design view. Your best bet would be to distribute your front end as an .accde or .mde depending on what version of Access you are running. This disables all design changes for the users. You would then have a master file that would allow you to make changes to the design and then republish when updates are needed.

[sophannaly]

Hi Seth Schrock ,
Thanks for your reply. Your idea solved my problem. May I ask is it true that accde format is slower than accdc? Is it possible for user to convert it to accdc file?

[Seth Schrock]

I don't have any experience working in a .accde file to know if it is slower, but I do know that it is used regularly by people as the version that is published to the end user.

As far as being able to convert it back to a .accdb file, there may be conversion tools available, but I don't know of any. I just tested it to see if just renaming it to have the .accdb file extension would change it (this does work to convert from .accdr to .accdb) and it still keeps its "locked" status. Code can't be viewed, design view is disabled, etc. even though I renamed it to .accdb.

[Rabbit]

You can't convert from accde to accdb. You need to keep a copy of the original accdb so you can make changes to that and create a new version of the accde to distribute each time.

[sophannaly]

@Seth Schrock and @Rabbit thanks for your reply.

[sophannaly]

Hi,

I face a problem that after save my access as accde file format, then when I ctrl+enter on form, I can't access to it. But in navigation pane, I can choose option to show table and when I click ctrl+enter on it, I can go to table and change its definition.

Can anybody tell me how to disable user to change table definition?

Sophanna

[zmbd]

sophannaly
Unfourtunately, the best you can do is to hide the toolbar/navigation/etc... try to trap the F11 and disable special keys.
There is no other way that I know of to keep the users out of the tables even in an accde file.

[Seth Schrock]

It might work to split your table into a backend file and then password protect the backend so that users can't access the file directly. Then import the table into your .accde file. You can't edit anything other than the data in linked table (you can view it though) so this might work.

[sophannaly]

@zmbd Thanks for your confirmation that in .accde file user still can change table definition.
@Seth Thanks for your idea. I will give a try.