Disable Office Dialog Boxes

Question

I'd like to disable as many Microsoft Office dialogue boxes as possible. For example, in Excel, there is a "Welcome to Page Break Preview" dialogue box that will sometimes appear when printing a workbook. One can add a key to the registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Options\NoPBPAlert and set its value to 1. The dialogue will then stop appearing any more, equivalent to checking its checkbox.

Are there any other keys (or settings files, or something else) that I can set that will disable any other such dialogue boxes for Excel, Word and/or PowerPoint?

The reason I'd like to do this is I am using Office automation in a server environment (which is a big no-no, I know) and dialogue boxes hose up the process. Disabling as many of them as I can would make things better.

Answer 1

I'm seeing two ways here:

1. trace registry access as you disable messages
2. use a tool like Buzof to take care of pop-up dialogs

Point 1 means you watch the registry key(s) accessed by the respective Office application as you try to do whatever it takes to pop up the undesired dialogs and then set the checkbox "do not show this again". SysInternals Process Monitor might help you a lot with that. This way you will collect at least some of the values that control the behavior. Unfortunately, there are tons of pop-up dialogs which cannot be suppressed with a checkbox because they are meant to have you decide on something, so it's more down to a yes-or-no reply or something else. These are not as easily suppressed. Which brings us to...

Point 2: there are some applications out there that watch for pop-up windows as they are opening. Personally, I prefer Basta Computing Buzof. The windows can be identified by their caption, their content (message) text, and the buttons presented which you can use to train the tool to give a specific answer each time the window appears later. So it's not just escaping out of every window that appears but is able to react to each window the way it is trained to do.

A combination of both might be the best possible solution here if you cannot do what you want to do without using Office applications and their GUI.

Maybe if you let us know what exactly is the goal of your automation approach, somebody might give you ideas on how to get rid of the UI and all the hassle it causes in automation.