Change setting using macro - Keep Desktop Objects on Layer

Thank you, Eskimo. I will follow up on the links you provided to see if I can figure anything out. Certainly will share, if I do.

Yes, this setting as a document property, and individual drawing scales per page rather than per document. Those are on my wish list.

God bless.

You and everyone else.  I force clients to remove desktop item and turn keep desktop object on layer off!

Eskimo, I'm almost there. You're discovery of the Registry value for this setting was the key. After seeing that I thought, Hmm, I wonder if there is a way to edit Registry settings using VBA. Turns out, there is!

I wrote a quick macro that will read the Registry value for "KeepDesktopObjectsOnLayer" and then toggle it on or off based on what it finds. And it actually works. If you paste the script below into a module and step through the code using F8, you can see it do its thing. And if you have the Registry Editor open to this key and press F5 to refresh the window after running the script, you can see that it has changed the value.

Unfortunately, CorelDraw isn't aware that the setting was changed externally, so it remains the same. Closing CorelDraw will also overwrite the Registry value with whatever it was left as in the program.

So I'm wondering if you can figure out away to refresh/reload the application settings (or at least that value) with the update from the Registry. That will be the solution.

Here is my script:

Sub ToggleKeepDtObjOnLayer()
'Toggle the CorelDraw application setting: Keep Desktop Objects on Layer
On Error GoTo Oops
Dim WS As Object
Dim RegKey As String, Value As Variant, sType As String
'REG_SZ A string
'REG_DWORD A Number An integer
'REG_BINARY A binary value An integer
'REG_EXPAND_SZ An expandable string (e.g., "%windir%\\calc.exe") A string

Set WS = VBA.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
RegKey = "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Corel\CorelDRAW\23.0\Draw\Application Preferences\VGDoc Pref Settings\KeepDesktopObjectsOnLayer"
If WS.RegRead(RegKey) = 0 Then
Value = 1
Else
Value = 0
End If
sType = "REG_SZ"
WS.RegWrite RegKey, Value, sType

Done:
Set WS = Nothing
Exit Sub

Oops:
MsgBox Err.Number & ": " & Err.Description
Resume Done
Resume 'For debugging

End Sub