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Microsoft Access Team Blog

Get product announcements, tips and tricks, and news directly from the team @ Microsoft.

March 2008 - Posts

Video demo of how to include the XPS/PDF functionality in your runtime application
Mike Stowe has a great article and video demo of how to an add-in to a Access 2007 deployment package created from the Package Solution Wizard. He chains the XPS/PDF addin as the example but you can use the technique to install any addin package with Read More...
Seven new international builds of the runtime are available for download
Today we released runtime builds for Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Thai. The other languages are working their way through the process. Enjoy! Read More...
2007 templates have been updated
Some of our customers have reported problems printing mailing labels on contacts, customers, employees tables in the 2007 templates. The contacts type Address field was defined as a Memo data type. Unfortunately, the report mailing label wizard filters Read More...
Access 2007 Runtime SP1 is now available
I know lots of you are very anxious to get your hands on this build. You can go download the SP1 runtime. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D9AE78D9-9DC6-4B38-9FA6-2C745A175AED&displaylang=en This version of the Access 2007 Read More...
Network World article - SharePoint taking business by storm
There is a good article about SharePoint on Network World. Here are some of the more interesting quotes: "Microsoft's SharePoint Server is on a billion dollar juggernaut to potentially become the next must-have technology, offering companies tools Read More...
New update for Ribbon Creator
Avenius Gunter's Ribbon Creator just got better. Earlier this month he released version 1.1016 with a number of changes: New Features: Callback "getVisible" integrated in Ribbon XML. Callback "getEnabled" integrated in Ribbon XML. Read More...
PC World's review of Office Live Workspaces mentions Access
There is a good review of Office Live Workspace just published by PCWorld. They mention our favorite Office application, Microsoft Access... “Office Live Workspace supports Excel files, too, though none of the templates available when we reviewed the Read More...
Tell Us: How do you validate data?
We build a lot of sample applications on the team to test stuff. Jeff Conrad is putting together a database to track the NFL season and needed a way to make it impossible to create multiple records of the same teams playing each other in the same week Read More...
Runtime SP 1 update is imminent
I'm getting regular pings about the runtime. The update is imminent but I can't specify an exact date (you never know when a recall class bug is found). The update will include all fixes for SP 1 and release of the international languages. Stay tuned Read More...
Data Points: Pivots, ThickToast and Researchers
The power of the pivot table Christine Harrell gives some tips on pivot tables in Access ThickToast get's some props Garry Robinson's Thicktoast Access based Basecamp product gets featured on the 37signals blog. Researchers use Access to make case for Read More...
The story of the Office Ribbon
Some of you may have already seen this posted in Jensen’s blog.  Jensen is the GPM of the Office User Experience team and was the lead for the implementation of the Ribbon in Office 2007.  Last week at the MIX conference in Las Vegas, Read More...
Tell us how you organize code snippets
Many of the Access developers I have meet have a system for organizing code snippets. You know, the common fragments of code that are reuse for project after project. We are interested in learning more about readers of this blog organize code that is Read More...
Pushing Access data to the web: Integrating with Office Live Small Business
Recently our friends over in Office Live have had major announcements about both the Office Live Workspace and Office Live Small Business products. Office Live Workspace announced global availability last Tuesday. It allows you to store your files and Read More...
SQL Server Data Services
Microsoft is now getting into the lightweight database game with SQL Server Data Services . It looks to follow a similar pattern to simpleDB and CouchDB with named, attribute pairs in a flat storage space and accessibility through REST. Some of the interesting Read More...
CouchDB
Damien Katz showed off CouchDB . This is another example of a lightweight non-relational database that you can access through a REST API. The idea of Couch is to store self contained sets of information (like Business Cards which don't contain foreign Read More...
Calling all Access book authors
One thing I have learned over the years of shipping Access is that book authors turn out to be some of the best sources of feedback on our future plans and a steady stream of bugs. Last release Jeff Conrad, John Viescas, Roger Jennings, and Martin Reid Read More...
Creating Passionate Users
Kathy Sierra is a great speaker that talks about creating passionate users. Before MSFT I spend 6 years creating Access solutions for users and always found Kathy's ideas really useful, interesting and applicable to my applications. Her blog is a great Read More...
Video demo: use the expression builder
There is a new video demo introducing the expression builder to new users. Here is the topic description: "You can use expressions throughout Access—for example, to calculate values, act as query criteria, or validate data. The Expression Builder helps Read More...
Amazon's simple DB
Mike Culver is showing off Amazon's newest web service call Simple DB that is a lightweight data store in the cloud accessed via a REST web service. The structure uses domains (like tables) that contain attribute and value pairs. You can do some cool Read More...
Visualizing large data sets
I am down at Etech in San Diego this and thought I would share some of the things I found Interesting. Information Visualization is a Medium Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen Design did a great little talk about using visualizations to show large data sets in Read More...
Bill Gates talks about Access
Skip to minute 6 in this video http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2008/02/12/the-bill-gates-interview.aspx Access, of course, has been phenomenally successful, but you think of it as just client forms and client data. Now [with Access] 2007, they Read More...
How to automatically populate fields in a form specified in the List Items Edit Form with new data
Today's guest writer is Sue Schaefer from Support Training. She recently wrote a helpful article about how the List Item Edit form works with OpenArgs. The new-to-Access 2007 List Items Edit Form property of a Lookup field allows you to pass the value Read More...
Tip: Show the TOC in 2007 developer reference
The next time you are searching through the developer reference turn on the Table of Contents by clicking the small purple book icon. You will now get a great MSDN style expandable navigation. This is really helpful when looking up things in the Object Read More...
Zac Woodall moving on...
I'm sure you've all noticed that I've been less than active on the blog lately.  I'm sorry for the lull, and the reason is that change is afoot. After 7.5 years working on the data team here in Office I've decided to make a change.  Monday 3/3 Read More...
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