I have recently noted in my Outlook 2003 that the three items in the Tools menu under the heading of Macro simply do nothing. They are not greyed out; they can be clicked but nothing happens. I have so far run Detect and Repair from the Help menu to no effect. I then read that if the menus are greyed out it is due to VBA not being installed so I thought maybe the VBA installation is broken; I ran the Office installation program; removed VBA, which gave me the grey menus in Outlook and then Re-ran the installation and reinstalled VBA and am now back exactly where I started - non-effective items in the Macros submenu.

Does anybody have any idea what is going on here? and. more important, can you fix it?

Did you want to use the VBA buttons? If not, you can remove them by using right click > customise on the menu bar

If you want to use VBA, then I'm not sure

What I was planning on doing was writing some simple macros, not for any particular purpose as yet but simply to get some ideas of what can be done. It seems that all access to the VB editor and Macros has been removed from Outlook. (It works perfectly well in Word.)

As far as I can detect no security setting has been changed and I have tried disabling add-ins to see if that made a difference - it didn't. In any case the only one I have is AVG anti-virus.

OK I have found the solution but have no idea what caused it.


In the registry there is a key

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Resiliency\DisabledItems

This contains a list of binary keys with odd alphanumeric names but by double clicking on the keyname you can detect what has been disabled. One of mine was VBA. So I exported the key first, just in case I need it again, and then deleted it.

The menu items are now available. Whether or not this will throw up some other problem remains to be seen.

Glad you got it working, and thanks for posting the solution

A good bit of detective work there