Understand the Trust Center

- [Instructor] All Access database files have the potential to contain dangerous or malicious code buried within the embedded macros or Visual Basic programs. If you're unsure of a database's origins, for instance, if you just downloaded it from a random website, then you should be very careful about allowing them to run before you have a chance to check them out to make sure they're safe. Because of this, Access requires that you give specific permissions to a database file before it'll activate and run any code that it might contain within the database container. When opening a file for the first time, Access will display this yellow security bar across the top of the screen.

There are several ways that we can handle this. First, we can click on the X in the upper right-hand corner to dismiss the warning. Access will let us work, but it won't run any macros or code modules. This could prevent the database from functioning as it was intended. You can also go over and click the Enable Content button. This will trust this specific file. Access will then remember this file and it won't ask us again the next time that we work on it. Or, we could also go over and click on this link that says, Click for more details. That'll take us to an info page that'll display more information about the warning and give us the opportunity to specify some additional settings.

To do that, I'll come to the Enable Content button, go ahead and give it a click, and then click on Advanced Options. That will display some information about the specific Security Alert that's popping up, and we can also get access into the Trust Center using this link at the bottom. Let's go ahead and give that a click. Now, the Trust Center is an important component of the Access database, so let me show you another way that we can get here. Let's go ahead and cancel out of this, I'll go ahead and close out of the Security Alert, and then we'll return back to our main interface. To get back to the Trust Center, I'll come up to the File tab, we'll come down to Options, then I'll click Trust Center at the bottom of the menu on the left.

Finally, I'll click on the Trust Center Settings button. This will bring us back to the screen that we were just looking at. At the top of this menu, we have some options for Trust Publishers, Trusted Locations, Trusted Documents, and so on. Trusted Documents are files that you've previously granted access permission to run. We can also trust a location on our computer, and then any files in that location will automatically be trusted as well. Let's go ahead and trust the Exercise Files folder for this course, so that we're not gonna be bothered with a security warning throughout the remainder of the course. To do that, I'll click on Trusted Locations.

Then, I'll come down, and press the Add new location button. I'll click on the Browse button, and then browse out to my Desktop which is where I store the Exercise Files folder. I'll go ahead and click on it once to select it and then press OK. Then, it's really important that I check this box here that says, Subfolders of this location are also trusted. This will make sure that we trust all the files in the Exercise Files folder as well as any subfolders that it might contain. Go ahead and press the OK button, and we'll see a new entry here for our User Locations. Finally, I'll press the OK button at the bottom, and then OK once again.

Then, if I go ahead and close this file and then go back into my Exercise Files, into the Chapter 1 folder, and I open it up again, we'll notice that we don't get the yellow security warning across the top of the screen anymore. If you ever wanna return to the Trust Center when the yellow message bar is not displayed, you can find it stashed in the File tab, Options, Trust Center, and then Trust Center Settings. And any time you want, you can return to the settings to revoke a trusted location as well. Opening databases that you created yourself or ones that come from the featured templates usually aren't gonna pose much of a threat.

But if you're ever unsure about who created a particular database file, it's best to play it safe and explore its contents before allowing it to run any code on your computer.