Access – Bug – The Case of the Disappearing Status Bar

It has been reported by 2 different MVPs now where the Status Bar just ups and leaves, disappears. And when 2 distinct MVPs experience the same issue, Huston, we have a bug!

No big deal right! The obvious solution being to simply reset the database option to enable the Status Bar:

File -> Options -> Current Database -> Display Status Bar (under the Application Options heading)

Yet, this did nothing for either of them!

Sound familiar to anyone? Haven’t we seen this behavior before, remember:

Open last used database when Access starts Not Working

There’s a new bug with Access 2016 in which the Open last used database when Access starts property does not work. This issue also seem to involve hung msaccess.exe process, so Access does not appear to be shutting down properly. When exiting Access, be sure to use check the Windows Task Manager for hung processes…

Continue reading →

So what is one to do exactly, mess around in the registry obviously! 🙂

Option 1 – Registry Fix

The solution proposed by Colin was to change the value in

HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-1504511334-2047483144-2682755676-1001\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Access\Settings\Show Status Bar

Obviously, your SID will be different!

But when I checked no such entry existed on my installation. I’ve checked a couple VMs and none have such a key either, even after toggling the setting in the dialog.

Like with my previous article I turned towards:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Access\Settings\

At the end of the day, you are looking for a Show Status Bar DWord entry. Worse case scenario, you can easily create the entry if it does not exist.

Remember:

0 = Disables/Not shown
1 = Enabled/Showing

Option 2 – ShowToolbar Method

Another option would be to use the ShowToolbar method as brought to my attention by a comment from Karl. Thus, you can do something like:

DoCmd.ShowToolbar "Status Bar", True

The issue being this only works for the current Access session, so it needs to be executed every time a database is opened.