From the course: Access Essential Training (Office 365/Microsoft)

Understand the Access Trust Center - Microsoft Access Tutorial

From the course: Access Essential Training (Office 365/Microsoft)

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Understand the Access Trust Center

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- [Instructor] All Access database files have the potential to contain dangerous or malicious code buried within macro objects or Visual Basic modules. Malicious code could mess up your data, or worse, it can reach out into your operating system and wreck havoc on the files as well. If you're unsure of a database's origins, for instance, if you just downloaded it from a random internet site, you should be very careful about allowing them to run before you have a chance to check them out and make sure that they're safe. As a precaution, Access requires that you give specific permissions to every database file before it'll activate and run any code that might reside within its container. Microsoft has implemented a system that will automatically block files that you've downloaded from the internet, and that includes the Exercise Files that I've provided for this course. When opening a database file for the first time, Access will display a security message below the main toolbar. Depending on the security settings of your computer, you may either see this red security risk banner or a yellow security warning. Either way, we're given the option to dismiss this banner, but that will block any code elements that they contain and they may not function correctly. There's two different ways that we can respond to these. Let me close Access and take a look at the file system. The first way is on a file by file basis. Right-click on the database file and click Properties. At the bottom, we have a security section. This gives you the option to unblock the file with this checkbox. You'll check it and press OK, and you won't get that security message anymore. Let me just press the Cancel button here. So that's one option that you can apply to individual files one at a time. A second option is to tell Access that the Exercise Files folder is a trusted location, and then every file inside will automatically be trusted too. We could do that back in Access, so I'm going to double-click on this file to open it up again. That brings me back here where I see the red security risk banner. From here, we'll go to the File tab, and then down at the very bottom, click Options. At the bottom of the Options panel, click Trust Center, and then the Trust Center Settings button on the right. Here, we have two options that are useful. Trusted documents are files that you've previously granted Access permission to run. You can come in here to review or revoke permissions for individual files. We can also trust an entire location on our computer, and then any files in this location will automatically be trusted as well. I'd like to trust the Exercise Files folder for the course so that we aren't bothered with these security warnings throughout the remainder of the course. Click on the Add new location button at the bottom, and then click the Browse button. I'll go out into my desktop, which is where I've placed my Exercise Files folder. I'll select it and press OK. That fills in the path there. Then, check the box that says Subfolders of this location are also trusted. This will trust all the files in that folder and within any subfolders for each of the chapters. You can add a description if you'd like, and then press the OK button, and that adds a new entry here into our trusted locations. Now if I press OK and OK again to get out of the menu, I can now close Access and open up the file again, and you'll no longer see that security risk banner. So opening databases that you created yourself or ones that come from the featured templates aren't usually going to pose much of a threat. But if you're ever unsure about who created a particular database file that you've downloaded, it's best to play it safe and explore its content before allowing it to run any code on your computer.

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