Hide Toolbars

By default, the majority of Microsoft Office products allow the user to hide any toolbar. This is generally accomplished by selecting View from the menu bar and then selecting Toolbars from the resulting dropdown menu. A list of all the application's available toolbars appears, from which the user can simply uncheck the toolbars they want to hide.

In Visual Studio, the user can simply press on "Shift-Alt-Enter" from their keyboard to hide all of the toolbars. Although it might be rather easy to hide the toolbars in the Microsoft Office suite of products, the process of hiding toolbars is not always so straightforward. To hide the toolbars in some applications, the user has to be somewhat familiar with the source code.

Removing the Ability to Hide Toolbars

However, there are ways for system administrator to prevent the user from removing the toolbars from the user interface of Microsoft Office applications. This typically involves making some changes to the registry setting. Of course care should be taken when editing the registry because modifications to it can cause serious problems with the user's operating system.

As an alternative to modifying the registry, the system administrator might consider investing in an advanced security level product. These products lock the toolbars by password protecting them. This prevents the user from changing which toolbars are displayed unless they are supplied the password.