XL2000: How to Programmatically Disable Microsoft Excel Control Menu Commands (213502)

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The following sample Visual Basic macro, Disable_Control, disables the entire Windows Control menu in Excel. The macro disables the Control menu for the current session of Excel (when you restart Excel, the Control menu is reset). The macro RestoreSystemMenu restores the Control menu.

1. Start Excel, and then press ALT+F11 to start the Visual Basic Editor.
2. On the Insert menu, click Module.
3. In the module sheet, type the following code:

   Public Declare Function FindWindow Lib "user32" Alias "FindWindowA" _ 
         (ByVal lpClassName As String, ByVal lpWindowName As String) As Long 
   
   Declare Function GetSystemMenu Lib "user32" (ByVal hwnd As Long, _ 
         ByVal bRevert As Integer) As Integer 
   
   Declare Function DeleteMenu Lib "user32" (ByVal hMenu As Integer, _ 
         ByVal nPosition As Integer, ByVal wFlags As Integer) As Integer 
   					

The following procedure disables the Control menu:

Sub Disable_Control() 
   Dim X As Integer, hwnd As Long 
   hwnd = FindWindow("XLMain", Application.Caption) 
   For X = 1 To 9 
      'Delete the first menu command and loop until 
      'all commands are deleted 
      Call DeleteMenu(GetSystemMenu(hwnd, False), 0, 1024) 
   Next X 
End Sub 
					

The following procedure restores the Control menu, and to run this procedure, the Declare statements above must be in the module:

Sub RestoreSystemMenu() 
   Dim hwnd As Long 
   'get the window handle of the Excel application 
   hwnd = FindWindow("xlMain", Application.Caption) 
   'restore system menu to original state 
   hMenu% = GetSystemMenu(hwnd, 1) 
End Sub 
					

The commands on the Control menu are numbered, starting at zero. The default Control menu items are as follows: Restore is item 0, Move is item 1, Size is item 2, and so forth. Even if items are deleted, the first item always starts at zero.

To delete individual items from the Control menu without deleting the entire menu, you can specify the menu command to delete. For example, the following two lines of code, when used in place of the For ... Next loop in the Disable_Control macro, delete the Maximize (item 4) and Minimize (item 3) commands and disable the Maximize and Minimize buttons:

   Call DeleteMenu(GetSystemMenu(FindWindow("xlMain", _ 
         Application.Caption), False), 4, 1024) 
   Call DeleteMenu(GetSystemMenu(FindWindow("xlMain", _ 
         Application.Caption), False), 3, 1024)