January 2008 - Posts
You can find modScaleForm here on SourceForge. It is an open source utility for scaling Access forms to fit different display resolutions. As we've seen in a prior post, anchoring provides this kind of support in 2007 automatically.
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We just released a polished video geared towards explaining the why someone should use Access. Here is the introduction: Tired of juggling your business contact data among an address book, lists of orders, file folders, and ledgers? An Access database
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As you know, the Access Getting Started experience went through some dramatic changes in 2007. This redesign has contributed significantly to the uptake on templates. What most people don't know is the screen also has dynamic content that is updated regularly
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There is a new video demo that shows off the new data collection feature. This one is a more formal and polished than the other demos. Enjoy!
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Chris Downs from the Access user assistance team has just finished a nice video demo about making controls grow and shrink as the form is resized.
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I ran across this new Silverlight version of the Microsoft download center this morning. If you haven't seen Silverlight yet, it is pretty cool stuff. It is Microsoft's engine for doing rich graphics composition in the web. Here are all the
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Recently, I was asked the following question: All of my Access work has always been my sole responsibility and I have been accustomed to making all the design and development decisions, and doing all the work myself. I am now attempting to work on a project
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A few readers have recently expressed concern and anxiety about an article published by The Register . Particularly, “VBA will disappear completely when Office 2007 for Windows is replaced, sometime around 2009.” As someone who is working everyday on
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The Office Online writers for Access have recently produced four cool video demos about designing reports. The effort should help the topic Modify a report become much easier for people to understand.
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The other day I was working on a report where I wanted to build a sentence that included multiple fields from a record but I wanted to use rich text formatting to provide contrast . My scenario was pretty simple in that I wanted a bold title with a date
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This tip comes from Tim Getsch - from www.checkoutmycards.com . He wrote to me after seeing my recent post about Display As Hyperlink : There is the trick that I use for creating hyperlink navigation. Create an Access (not VBA) macro with a short name
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Here is another repost from my blog... Enjoy--Clint ----- One of the most enjoyable design challenges I have had over the last couple of years was redesigning how users can filter inside Access and Excel. The new filter dropdown menu and context menus
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There is an interesting article on cmswire about SharePoint adoption and applications. Choice quotes include: "The number of organizations that employ SharePoint for mission-critical applications is less than 20 percent, a figure expected to double over
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Brandon Smith-Daigle has recently released the 3.0 update for his UI Builder tool that helps Access developers to build customized user experiences in Forms without coding the VBA themselves. This tool is compatible with older versions of Access
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Abigail Short, one of the developers on the Access team who helped me to create Layout View and other new reporting features in Access 2007 is going to be presenting at the upcoming Office Developers Conference. Here's are a few words she wanted
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Ken Hockley has recently released his Goldsoft suite. These tools aim to increase Access developer productivity by helping to reduce the amount of time spent building necessary application plumbing so that developers can focus their effort on producing
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This is the final post of a three part series on Access Tips and Tricks provided by members of the Access team. It was originally posted on my blog but I'm reposting here for the benefit of the broader audience. Custom AutoFormats You can create a custom
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A while back I published this article on my personal blog . I'm republishing it hear for the benefit of the broader audience. _________ I have a confession to make… I started hacking around in computers with Windows 3.1—never learned how to
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We just published two new Access 2007 templates that are now available on Office Online. Expense Reports Create an expense reporting database for your business to track and approve expenses in addition to printing reports. Vehicle Maintenance Create a
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Those of you transitioning to Access 2007 from earlier versions of the product may notice the addition of a new property on the TextBox and ComboBox controls: Display As Hyperlink . You may wonder how this new property interacts with the existing Is Hyperlink
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For three months this fall we were fortunate to have Anshul Tandon working on our PM team as an intern. Anshul has now gone back to Louisiana State University where he's a member of the senior class. During his time with us one of his tasks was
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I've had a bunch of questions come in about this so I want to post here to give you all a quick update on the status of the Runtime issues for RTM. We're currently working on an update to the Runtime intended to address all the known issues which cause
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Community submitted templates are now live on Office Online!! "Er?" You say, "what has this to do with me?" I'm so glad you asked!! For the first time ever, there is now a Microsoft hosted service through which you
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Those of you out there building custom Ribbon UI for Access/Office might be interested to know that the Dummies folks have recently released a guide for building Ribbon UI titled (as you might expect) " RibbonX for Dummies ". The book
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