Microsoft Access Team Blog : Community

Office 2010 newsgroups

Clint Covington — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:21:00 GMT

Here is a link to Office 2010 newsgroups. The team will try to monitor and provide answers to questions in the Access newsgroup.

Smart Access has a new home

Clint Covington — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:16:34 GMT

Today’s guest writer is Garry Robinson, Access MVP and proud new owner of past Smart Access journals. I asked him to tell the community about the new home for Smart Access.

Hello Clint and Microsoft Access lovers,

I am happy to announce that my company has purchased the exclusive rights to Smart Access. A great magazine that was put together by over a 100 Access professionals for more than 10 years. Purchasing all these articles (300+) realizes an ambition that I have had for years to rapidly grow our web site and knowledge based products.

So once I purchased the materials, my first goal was to rebuild the pdf's of the magazines and the downloads into collections so that people could refer to the materials on their own computers. That task is now completed and all this content is now available digitally at the following location. If you are interested in purchasing the products, use this special Access blog coupon code AB-45K2D46T6J till the end of July for a discount.

http://www.vb123.com/smart/

For those of you who are interested in what we do going forward with the Smart Access content, join my newsletter or twitter posts at http://www.vb123.com/news We hope to start posting material from the magazines in a well structured site from mid-August.

Access lives on and on…

Garry Robinson

Microsoft Office Access MVP 2006-2009

Sample Class Eases Creation of Similar Forms

Mike Stowe — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:40:58 GMT

Last week Joel Graff shared his story on how he used Access to track salt usage for the Illinois Department of Transportation. Some of you wanted to know more about the custom class that he uses to ease the creation of similar forms.

Joel has agreed to share a sample implementation of his custom class.

It basically uses three interrelated lookup tables to demonstrate the class with varying degrees of complexity (three different examples). I made use of the nifty article on writing help using reports to provide some information on how it performs. I’m no guru at interfaces / tutorial writing, but hopefully what I’ve sent is a sufficient example.

I suppose it's homebrewed enough anyone who knows better would get a chuckle or two off of it, but I'd love to see what someone else thinks.

You can download Joel’s sample database here.

Access Proves “worth its salt” for IDOT

Mike Stowe — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:15:00 GMT

Today’s guest blogger is Joel Graff. Joel is a field engineer with the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). He’s sharing how he utilized Access to prove the efficiency of their drivers and equipment in managing winter road conditions.

This last year salt prices skyrocketed on us (increasing threefold in some cases). As a result, upper management in IDOT insisted on using more "salt conservative" spreading policies when we apply salt to our roads during snowstorms. New policies were developed and handed out to our maintenance staff. Since IDOT maintenance is terribly understaffed, we triple our work force in the winter with temporary help, which only made abiding by the new policies more difficult.

To manage this challenge, I created a form that each plow driver I'm responsible for must fill out at the start and end of his or her shift. They record the tons of salt spread, the miles driven, and various other information.

Then, I take those forms and enter them into an Access database I wrote to help me track our salt usage. Over the course of the winter, I entered about 1,000 records into the database. I estimate that's about 1/4th of the total number of forms. At the end of the season, I did an informal statistical analysis on the data (including a histogram).

The above image is the general appearance of the database. I’ve found the split view is absolutely critical. I used the Split Form feature here, but often I still have to use my own implementation as the built-in feature is not exposed as a separate object to VBA.

In the General section of the form, the Storm, Teamsection, Shift, and Truck text boxes actually hide combo boxes. When the user clicks on the textbox, it makes the combo box visible (see below image). When the user leaves the combo box, the textbox reappears over top. To do this, I had to use the form’s timer event, otherwise I would run into control focus errors.

Data entry is partially automated, based on the truck that is selected. As a result of carrying over values from previous records, I can cut the number of keystrokes required to enter a record by one half to two-thirds or possibly more. There are 22 bound fields on the current form and can enter a record in as few as 7 fields on average.

The Manage Lists section of the form allows the user to manage the data that makes up the database’s lookup tables. Clicking on one of these options brings up a list manager (see the Subsection Manager image below). This is a form that’s actually based on a class I’ve written in VBA. Data is updated in the list box as it is typed in the form fields below. The form invokes its own instance of the class I wrote (“clsLookup”). The clsLookup object initializes the form by examining the form’s controls and determines which controls feed the list box data and which controls are used to filter that data. It saves me from having to continually recreate forms from scratch that all function essentially identically. It also reduces code bloat and errors.

When I proposed this to my maintenance staff, there was considerable resistance. "You'll never get them to fill out those forms!" and "Those electronic spreaders aren't reliable!" were the two most common objections. However, the results were quite valid. The forms were filled out, and with greater consistency than I'd anticipated. Further, the data indicated that our salt spreaders were accurately recording the data and our drivers really were doing what they were told! Without this database, there is no way I could possibly make that assertion with any quantifiable certainty.

In the near future, I will distribute the database to my maintenance yards so the yard supervisors can enter the information themselves and have it available for their purposes (they presently are required to track salt using antiquated software written in 1989). Any data they enter will automatically be submitted electronically, thereby saving me from having to manually enter several thousand records of data next year.

Further, I plan on incorporating a weather data feed so that I can correlate salt usage with varying winter conditions and examine how weather affects our salt spreading habits. That will probably pose the greatest challenge yet.

While this hasn't been my most complex Access project, it certainly proves to be among the most fruitful.

Data bars in an Access query

Clint Covington — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 08:43:34 GMT

Mike Alexander (Excel MVP) recently sent me a very cool trick that I hadn’t seen before. He uses some simple hackery and trickery to get data bars in a query. This is the first installment of a long series about how Access can be used to create cool dashboards.

You can see more free training videos from Mike at his web site.

Thanks for sharing Mike.

OpenGate releases Designer for Microsoft Access

Ryan McMinn — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 04:42:00 GMT

We are always proud of the tools customers make and sell around Access. Our friend Brandon send this update in along with a special offer for the blog readers.

OpenGate Software launched a new tool to help Access users create their database schema using a simple Q&A interface. The product, Designer for Microsoft Access, takes a user’s input and then creates the tables, fields, and all the necessary relationships and keys automatically. They are offering a free license of their Starter edition of UI Builder (a $99 USD value) with any purchase of Designer from now until February 1^st as long as you email them after you order and say you saw this posting on the Access blog.

If you are building tools for Access developers and users we would love to hear from you, click here to contact us.

Total Access Analyzer 2007 Preview

robcooper — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:21:44 GMT

One thing about being on the Access team that I enjoy is seeing some of the great work being done in the Access community. Among the forefront of this community is FMS, who is the leading developer of Access add-ins. FMS recently announced a preview version of Total Access Analyzer 2007 which is a tool that helps you create better Access databases. There are too many new features to list here, but here is a small subset that might be interesting to note:

Support for the .ACCDB file format added in Access 2007
Analysis of new macro actions including embedded macros
24 new reports!
Reports can now be viewed in Report View which provides an interactive experience for reports
Reports can be exported to PDF

Here's a link to the preview:

http://www.fmsinc.com/Products/analyzer/confprvw.asp

Enjoy!

Calling all Access user groups

Clint Covington — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:41:38 GMT

I’m looking to put together a page listing information about active Access user groups. Can you help?

One of the things I love about working on Access is the community. It is chuck full with people who are passionate about the product and the changes it enables in everything from business efficiency to tracking hobbies. It is always fun to watch people who enjoy the product get together and share learns in local user groups.

Here is what I need from you… If you are involved in a Access user group, send us an email with the following information:

User Group Name
Country
Region/State
City
URL
Meeting dates and times
How to get more information

Hopefully, we can provide a resource to help connect people with local efforts.

Community Clips about Access from Office Labs

Clint Covington — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:50:00 GMT

This is your chance to become famous! The Office Labs folks have released a cool site for help video. They have a free video recorder that makes the process really simple.

There are already 15 Access videos available. Go make a quick demo and share it with the community!

Zac Woodall moving on...

Zac Woodall — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 03:03:45 GMT

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 I'm starting a new role with the Virtual Earth team. For those of you who aren't familiar, VE is an awesome (if you're a map geek like me) technology which allows you to see maps of the entire world
complete with overlays of imagery taken from satellites or high resolution cameras mounted to the underbelly of a plane (bird's eye), location search, and travel directions.

They've got a really slick (and relatively new) 3D user interface for exploring the world, for which you can get a pretty good demo by checking out this virtual tour I put together of my time with MS (be sure to click "hybrid" at the top of the map, then "tour in 3D" on the pane at the left to get the best experience). If you find this stuff interesting, be sure to check out the Virtual Earth Blog for the latest info on what they're up to. Who knows, at some point I may make a re-appearance there.

Before I'm out the door though, I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for the wonderful passion you've shown for Access. This group has always been very open with feedback which helps us on the product team to understand the kinds of challenges you face every day in building your apps on the platform. We absolutely appreciate all of the time you spend here just trying to make Access better. The things we're doing in Access 14 are truly amazing, and I am more than a little disappointed that I won't get the first crack at sharing with you what we've been hard at work building for the last year or so. I really think you're going to find that the work we're doing is a direct path toward re-invigorating interest in Access as a platform across the app building community.

I'll leave you with a little taste of an update I've been working on for the Contacts template. This is something that I'm hoping to get up to a quality where we can share the .accdt directly with you soon. In the mean time though, here's a screenshot:

Wishing you all the best,
Zac

Office Online Community Submitted Database Templates

Zac Woodall — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 01:43:53 GMT

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 can publish and share database applications with the community at large. OfficeOnline is the template service that Microsoft uses to host its own document templates, and it is extremely popular, with 2.8 million Access 2007 template downloads for since Jan of 07. For 2007 it has been opened up for publication by anyone who has access to the web. Initially this support was just for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but as of mid-December you can now publish and share your own Access apps and samples through this service. Your templates get integrated directly into the system so users searching the site for a specific type of template will find your .accdt files right alongside the ones Microsoft has published. Community submitted templates are marked with a little red pawn, so users can distinguish them from Microsoft supplied templates, and as with the ones Microsoft publishes, each community template has a rating of 1-5 stars set by the community, and a count of downloads. Here's an example:

NOTE: In order to be able to browse templates submitted by the community, you must choose moderate or unfiltered for the "Community Filter" at the left hand side of the page.

Publishing

Now, I would love to be able to tell you that you can publish any application created with any version of Access to the site. For the first iteration this isn't going to be the case. For this version of the service, we've made an explicit decision to limit the functionality which can be uploaded in a template to features which don't automatically act on the user's behalf to edit or upload data, or to invoke functionality that would otherwise affect things outside the database. We're intentionally beginning with a very tight set of restrictions, with the intention of testing the system out and understanding the space better before we turn on more advanced functionality.

Here are the requirements for a template published to OfficeOnline:

Because we can open and scan the contents of them in code without booting Access on the server, the only template format we support is 2007's new .accdt format.
Templates which use features that require the database to be enabled, including VBA, action queries, and macro actions which change data without prompting the user first will be rejected by the publication engine.
Templates cannot have linked tables (if you think you'd need this in a template, I'd love too hear your scenario)

"What?" you say, "But I put VBA in everything!" Yes. I know you do. We want to enable this scenario eventually, but not for this round. There are a ton of really interesting things you can build and share on the template service which do not use code. You still have the full power of Access tables, queries, and reports, and you can build user-interface logic in forms using Access 2007's new embedded macro technology. Plus are a slew of interesting ways to slice data through the use of Queries and Expressions, and you can definitely build and share those. Here are some ideas of things which might be interesting to publish as templates:

Pre-populated data (e.g. US zipcode table)
Pre-designed Forms (e.g. a mahogany form background with polished wood buttons)
Pre-formatted reports (e.g. report for Seiko Smart Label Printer 420)
Complex many-table union query that returns the results of some really interesting thing
A scaled down demo of your for-sale solution with a link back to your own website for the full version

You can even build a fully functional data tracking application should you so choose. As an example, check out the cool little wedding tracking application built to help couples prepare for the big day by built by Abigail Short, one of the developers on the Access team (thank you Abigail!).

Tools

There are two key tools that everyone creating Access templates will want to take advantage of.

The Access 2007 Developer Extensions - After you've installed it, you will have a Developer -> Save as Template menu item in the Office button. This is by far the easiest way to create a template file.
The Access dev team's own Scott Gardner has put together a command line tool that you can run against your .accdt to pre-verify that it meets the rules imposed by OfficeOnline (thank you Scott!). Just run this tool from cmd.exe, passing in the location of your .accdt file and it will give you the OK, or a list of issues that will cause OfficeOnline to reject it. The tool requires that .Net 3.0 be installed on your system.

Submitting

Here's what you need to do to get your template submitted to Office Online:

Choose "Submit a Template" from the links on the left hand side of the Office Online template page (this can be a little hard to pick out of all the other links, see the picture to the right for a pointer).
Follow the submission steps
72 hrs. or so later your template should be live

Reference

You can find some information about Access 2007 templates here:

If you're looking for a more complete reference, we've arranged a deal with with Rational Press for blog readers to have a 35% discount on their title "The Rational Guide to Microsoft® Office Access 2007 Templates" by yours truly. The book assumes that readers will have the need to create safe templates like the ones required to upload to Office Online, and I include a detailed explanation of how to create interesting codeless solutions.

Interesting presentations about Access 2007

Clint Covington — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 08:44:00 GMT

Our friends in the UK Access User Group always put on a great national Seminar. It looks like the sessions this year were packed with helpful content and insight from developers. I found the following decks interesting:

Working with Access 2007 and SharePoint Services
presented by Derek Goodridge, WorkerThread Limited
Access 2007 Is Great – No It Isn’t – Yes It Is – No It Isn’t
presented by Alan Cossey
Access 2007 Runtime
presented by Ken V Smith

Props to Derek for his overview of SharePoint--lots of great information. There was one tip not covered in the talk that might be interesting for SharePoint users. Late in the cycle we added a feature called Cache List Data (it isn't documented very well) that improves SharePoint performance. You turn on Cached mode via the External Data | SharePoint Lists | Cache List Data. When the item is selected Access will cache all list data locally in the ACCDB. When a user closes the database an XML blob of data is stored in the database. When the user re-opens the database we hydrate the XML data and ask the server for items that have changed. The end result is significant client and server performance wins for large datasets. Something to consider if you are working with larger datasets against SharePoint.

Once again, enjoy the decks from the user group they are worth the download time.

Access in Chicago

Zac Woodall — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 02:18:00 GMT

One of my Access PM compatriots, Steve Greenberg, asked if I would share this with you folks:

Hello,

My name is Steven Greenberg and I’m a Program Manager on the Microsoft Access team. I’ve been at Microsoft for seven years, and I transitioned over to the Access team earlier this year. I’ve spent this year learning everything I can about Access, and writing specifications for our next version. I’m incredibly excited about the work we’re doing. I can’t wait to be able to talk about it publicly on this blog and in other venues.

But for the moment, I’ve got a quick request:

During the holiday season, the frenetic pace of development here at Microsoft slows down a bit. People tend to take the opportunity to use up spare vacation days that expire at the end of the year, and many members of our engineering travel home to visit their families.

This can make it challenging to keep the development schedule moving forward, but it also means that it’s a good time for the folks who are here to step back a bit and talk to some customers.

In this spirit, I’ll be traveling with Clint Covington and Kenneth Shaw (two other team members) to the Midwestern U.S. in a few weeks. We’ve already got two visits set up with Fortune 500 companies. We will be talking about our plans for the next version of Microsoft Access and asking for our customers’ direct and candid feedback.

We have some time from 9:00am to 4:00pm in Chicago on December 18^th that we’d like to fill up with a visit to a third customer. We’re actively looking for someone in the Chicago area who would like to meet with us. We’d be excited to visit you at your place of work, whether you work alone, in a company of 100,000 people or in any situation in between.

We’re particularly interested in hearing about your experiences with Access 2007 and/or SharePoint. Because we’ll be talking about our plans for the next version of Access, we’ll ask you to sign an NDA.

So if you’re in the Chicago area and are interested in some face time with the product team, we’d love to meet you. We probably only have time to meet with one person face to face, but if we can’t visit you in person, we’d be happy to set up a phone call or a Live Meeting after we get back.

If you'd be interested, please send me an e-mail (stevegr@microsoft.com), and we’ll get in touch!

AccessJunkie's updated 2007 content

Zac Woodall — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:28:00 GMT

Our very own Access Junkie, Jeff Conrad, has updated his 2007 Help links and FAQ. These are great resources for 2007 info. Jeff is an engineer on our test team who is very active in the newsgroups, and he's tried to capture answers to the questions that he sees asked most commonly by the community at large. Here are some pointers:

2007 Help Links: http://accessjunkie.com/helplinks2007.aspx
2007 FAQ: http://accessjunkie.com/faq2007.aspx

For those who are curious, Jeff is hosting this site on OfficeLive. If you're of a mind, you can create your own OfficeLive site for free, complete with a custom domain name like Jeff has.

Meet The Access Team at the 2008 Office DevCon in San Jose

Zac Woodall — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:37:00 GMT

Some members of the Access team are going to be attending the 2008 Office Developer Conference being held in San Jose, CA from Feb 10-13. It will still be pretty early for us to be talking about the next version so most of the content will be 2007 focused, but for those who like to walk the bleeding edge of tech, we definitely plan to talk some about our Access 14 plans as well.

This is a great opportunity for you to meet up with members of the product team in an informal environment where you'll have the opportunity to give us your direct candid feedback about the product. We'd love to see you there!!