Locking Down an Office Configuration

How to Lock Down Options with System Policies

To lock down the options available in Office 2000, you use system policies. System policies are organized by application in system policy templates. Within the templates are categories (such as Tools | Options or Disable items in user interface), and within the categories are individual policies. You set a policy by selecting it in the System Policy Editor.

The following types of policies are useful for locking down options.

Disable command bar items

You can disable any menu command in the user interface, along with the corresponding toolbar button. To disable a standard command bar item, use the Disable command bar buttons and menu items policy in the Predefined category for a particular Office application. To disable any other command bar button, use the Custom category and enter the control ID for the item.

When you disable an item on a menu or toolbar, that item still appears on the menu or toolbar; but the item is shaded, which means the corresponding command is unavailable. When a user points to a disabled toolbar button, the ScreenTip indicates that the button has been disabled.

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Prevent command bar customization

To ensure a consistent user interface across all of the computers in your organization, you can stop users from customizing menu bars or toolbars. To disable command bar customization, turn on the Disable command bar buttons and menu items policy in the Predefined category and select the Tools | Customize check box.

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Disable shortcut keys

Many users memorize the keyboard shortcuts for various menu commands and toolbar buttons. If you want to completely lock down an option, you must disable the shortcut key as well as the corresponding menu bar and toolbar items.

You can disable any shortcut key by using the Disable shortcut keys policy under the Predefined or Custom category. When a user presses a shortcut key combination that has been disabled, the application does not respond.

Note   Even when you disable both a menu command and its corresponding shortcut key, the command is still available through Visual Basic for Applications. This is by design, so you can continue to create macros that use the command.

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Disable dialog box items

You can prevent users from changing options in dialog boxes by locking down those options through a policy. For example, many of the settings in the Options dialog box (Tools menu) already appear in the policy templates, so you can easily disable an option that you don’t want your users to change.

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See also

You use system policies to lock down many options in Office 2000. For detailed information about using system policies, see Managing Users’ Options with System Policies and Using the System Policy Editor.

To make a feature completely unavailable, you must disable the menu command and any keyboard shortcuts corresponding to that feature. For more information about disabling menu bar commands, see How to Disable Menu Commands and Toolbar Buttons. For more information about disabling keyboard shortcuts, see How to Disable Shortcut Keys.