PRB: Programmatic Access to Office XP VBA Project Is Denied (282830)

SYMPTOMS

Code that is written to automate an Office application and programmatically manipulate the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) environment and object model may fail on Office XP with one of the following error messages:

From Visual Basic or VBA:

Run-time error '6068': Programmatic Access to Visual Basic Project is not trusted

From Microsoft Visual C++, Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), or ActiveX Template Library (ATL):

HRESULT = 0x800A17B4 (-2146822220) "Programmatic Access to Visual Basic Project is not trusted"

The same code works without error on computers with Office 97 and Office 2000.

CAUSE

Office XP adds a security option to deliberately lock out programmatic access to the VBA object model from any Automation client unless a user chooses to permit such access. This is a per user and per application setting, and denies access by default.

This security option makes it more difficult for unauthorized programs to build "self-replicating" code that can harm end-user systems.

RESOLUTION

For any Automation client to be able to access the VBA object model programmatically, the user running the code must explicitly grant access. To turn on access, the user must follow these steps:

Open the Office application in question. On the Tools menu, click Macro, and then click Security to open the Macro Security dialog box.
On the Trusted Sources tab, click to select the Trust access to Visual Basic Project check box to turn on access.
Click OK to apply the setting. You may need to restart the application for the code to run properly if you automate from a Component Object Model (COM) add-in or template.