Disable or Override Ribbon/CommandBar commands in MSWord using VBA

Question

Hi There

First of all I'm going to state right out that I've never worked with VB in the context of coding macros before - my skills lie in other areas (PHP, Javascript, getting there with C#, etc). However, I've been asked by a colleague to lock down a document so that the user cannot change font faces, sizes or colours but does still have access to bold, italic, underline etc.

I started out by protecting the document and restricting formatting but this is far too restrictive - effectively only allowing the user to apply premade styles - which is going to be unintuitive for the users who are not used to working with styles.

So I've resorted to trying to writing a macro to do the job, but unfortunately I'm at the really pointy end of the learning curve and I honestly don't know where to start.

You're going to laugh at me but so far this is all I have in my ThisDocument.

Private Sub Document_Open()

End Sub

Ermmmm... help!

Cheers

Iain

Answer 1

I think you could write a macro that removed tools from the toolbar, menus, maybe even keyboard shortcuts. Not sure how you'd reverse it though when they opened another document.

Maybe a better solution is to use an application to edit only certain text fields that you define and which ultimately change text in a word document?

Answer 2

Iain, this is a pretty common need. Here's a good information page on what will get you started: Using VBA to Control Built-In Commands in the 2007 Office System