Disabling Excel's Help System

Mark is a high school teacher and he wants to disable Excel's Help system during student tests. He wonders if there is an easy way to do this.

The answer is yes, there is a relatively easy way. You could set up a couple of macros that disable and restore the most common ways of opening the Help system. The following macros, DisableHelp and EnableHelp, do that.

Sub DisableHelp()
    EnableControl 984, False ' help
    EnableControl 1004, False ' Office Assistant
    Application.OnKey "{F1}", ""
End Sub

Sub EnableHelp()
    EnableControl 984, True ' help
    EnableControl 1004, True ' Office Assistant
    Application.OnKey "{F1}"
End Sub

Sub EnableControl(Id As Integer, Enabled As Boolean)
    Dim CB As CommandBar
    Dim C As CommandBarControl
    For Each CB In Application.CommandBars
        Set C = CB.FindControl(Id:=Id, recursive:=True)
        If Not C Is Nothing Then C.Enabled = Enabled
    Next
End Sub

Both of the main macros call the EnableControl macro. This macro does the actual work of removing the Help options from the menus and toolbars. Note that the main macros also use the OnKey method to disable (or restore) the functioning of the F1 function key. To use these macros, you can call them from a suitable event procedure, such as those that automatically run when a workbook is opened and closed.

The macros will run just fine in all the modern versions of Excel, but they are particularly useful in versions prior to Excel 2007. In those versions the menus and toolbars are modified by the macros, but not so in Excel 2007. The Help button (small question mark within a circle) remains at the upper-right corner of the worksheet window and can still be clicked. Regardless of your version, the F1 key is disabled and enabled by the macros.

Even with a macro such as this at work, you need to realize that the Help system is not totally disabled. The Help files still reside on disk, and could be located via Windows and opened. (You don't even need Excel to open and view them.)

Typically the Excel Help files are stored in files that use the CHM file extension. Disabling the file can be as simple as locating the proper CHM help file on the disk and renaming it to something different.

For example, Excel may be installed on a certain machine in the directory "c:\program files\microsoft office\office11". The Help file for this installation of Excel can be found in "c:\program files\microsoft office\office11\1033". The main Excel file is XLMAIN11.CHM, but there may be other Help files (CHM extension) in the directory as well. All you need to do is to rename these files something such as XLMAIN11.XXX. Since the Help program cannot locate the file, it cannot display any help in Excel.