Microsoft Access Team Blog : Template

Jump start new Access databases with a custom blank database template

cdowns — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:25:26 GMT

Today's guest blogger is Access MVP Glenn Lloyd of Argee Services. Check out his Office help blog and Access Help and Tutorial Blog.

There are certain features that virtually every Access database application includes. Certain tables like people’s names and addresses, certain forms for managing lookup lists and many to many relationships, custom splash screens, and on and on. Particular developers may prefer ‘off-standard’ property settings for forms and reports and for the database itself. Depending on the general type of databases a developer focuses on, the developer might set the same references in every project.

Manually importing these common features can take a fair amount of time. Access 2007 introduced the ability to reduces that startup overhead literally to no time at all. All you need to do is put together a default Blank database template and store it in the right location. Then for your next new project create a new Blank database. The new database will inherit absolutely everything that the template includes. It will have exactly the custom property settings that you need.

Including custom property settings in prototype forms and reports in the template will continue to yield time saving dividends, beyond what you have already saved in the creation of the database itself, because each form and report you create from those prototype objects will be populated with exactly the settings you want. Allen Browne, from whom I first learned of this capability, has some excellent tips on template contents and how to set up the template this article http://allenbrowne.com/ser-43.html

Give the idea a try. You will be glad you did!

Glenn

Send your Power Tips to Mike and Chris at accpower@microsoft.com.

How do you track customer relationships?

Ryan McMinn — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:00:00 GMT

This is guest post from Allie Rutherford a summer college intern on the Access team.

Do you own your own business or are you in a position where you have to keep track of your customer relationships and sales leads? Have you ever wished your CRM or sales software was a little bit different or easier to use?

Today, I am posting to ask the users what they expect and desire from Customer Relationship Management software. We are currently doing research into how businesses and small companies track their leads and customers. Your input is invaluable to us and will greatly aid our research into this topic!

To help facilitate conversation on this topic, we have created a rough prototype database in Access of a streamlined CRM system. Here’s a link for you to try it out:

Some questions for you all:

- What system do you currently use?

- Are you satisfied with your current system?

- What makes it better than other systems you have tried?

- Does our prototype meet your expectations of a simple CRM system?

- How could our prototype be improved? Are there any features you wish were included or are especially important to you and your business?

You can respond in the comments or directly to us via the contact page.

Thanks everyone!

Allie

Write your own Help

accblog — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:49:44 GMT

Sure, that sounds like the frustrated outburst of an overworked technical writer, but when you build Access applications for others to use, you're pretty much on the hook to write the Help for them.

Last month, we featured the “How to synchronize combo boxes" template, and commenter Shairal was interested to know how the "Click to see details" reports were done.

I think this is a pretty clever way to add Help to your Access applications.To summarize the system, the links (actually command buttons formatted to look like hyperlinks) open a simple Access report, and the report is bound to a table that contains all of your Help topics. The correct topic is determined by filtering the report so that it displays the appropriate record from the table. That filtering is done by the OpenReport action of the embedded macro in each command button. Here’s how to do it:

The first step is to create the table that contains the Help content. In the template, this is named tblExplanations, and in Design View, it looks like this:

I’ve selected the Explanation field so that you can see the Text Format property is set to Rich Text. This field contains the body of the Help topic, so you want to be able to add bolding, underlines, and so on. Once you create this table, (or better yet, just import this table’s structure into your own database), you can fill it in with your “assistance content”, as we tech writers call it:

For each row, type a unique keyword or phrase in the Source field, which you will use later to filter the report when you run it. For example, if the topic is about adding employees, type something like “Adding Employees” or “AddEmp”.

The next step is to create the report. In the template, this is called rptExplanations. You might just want to import this from the template into your own database to save yourself the trouble of recreating it, but it’s very simple to create. Here’s what it looks like in Design View:

You don’t really need the Source field to be displayed on this report, but it’s included here for your reference. As long as you have the Title and Explanation fields in the Detail section, you’re good to go. Also, be sure the Explanation text box is set to display Rich Text, so that your formatting comes through.

The final step is to sprinkle command buttons throughout your application where they are needed, so your users can click them to view the Help topics. Here’s a screenshot of the properties for one of the command buttons in the template:

The On Click event contains an embedded macro. To create an embedded macro:

Click the property box, and then click the Build button […].
In the Choose Builder dialog box, click Macro Builder, and then click OK.
Create the macro, as shown below.
Click Close, and when asked if you want to save the changes and update the property, click Yes.

Here’s one of the macros from the template:

The Where Condition argument of the OpenReport macro action is where you link the button to the correct topic. In this example, circled above, the filter is “VBA Code”. This makes the report display only the topic that contains that string in the Source field.

Note that this example might a bit confusing because of the string “VBA Code”—that’s just because the Help topic is about using VBA code, so that’s what was chosen as the key phrase for the Source field. As mentioned in an earlier example, if the topic were about adding new employees to your database, you might use a keyword such as “AddEmp”, and the Where Condition argument would look like this:

[tblExplanations]![Source]="AddEmp"

Now, as you add more features to your application, just add more rows to tblExplanations, and more command buttons at strategic locations in your application. You can even create a form based on tblExplanations to make it easier to write new topics.

Posted by Chris Downs, writer, Access IW Content Team

Template demonstrates how to synchronize combo boxes

accblog — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:54:20 GMT

You can download a template for Access 2007 that demonstrates how to synchronize two combo boxes. For example, say you choose a category from one combo box, and you want a second combo box to only display products within that category. The template shows you how to make it happen.

On the Getting Started page of Access, click Sample in the left pane, and then click How to synchronize combo boxes.

Click Download, and Access launches the template. The template contains all the instructions you need to set up combo boxes of your own, whether you want to use VBA code or macros.

You can also download the template via Office Online here.

Assets, Students, Tasks templates now have videos

Clint Covington — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:14:02 GMT

Today’s guest writer is Wouter Steenbergen, one of the newest members of the Access Program Management team.

Several months ago we updated the contacts template. Because of the overwhelming positive feedback it generated we updated the Assets, Student and Task management Access templates.

Some of the modifications include:

Updated color schemes,
New getting started screen,
Video’s to demonstrate how to use the database and modify the database,
Improved some of the database functionality to make it easier to use and more consistent, and
Expanded the Students database to make it easier to track meta data about guardians relationships with a many-to-many junction table.

Here is a link to the videos for a quick preview:

Assets
Use the Assets Database template
Modify the Assets Database template

Students
Use the Students Database template
Modify the Students Database template

Tasks
Use the Task Management Database template
Modify the Task Management Database template

You can find the templates online (links provided above), or from the Access start screen after selecting Business or Education from the “From Microsoft Office Online” section.

Go check them out and let us know what you think!

Free Bugs application available for download

Clint Covington — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:21:22 GMT

A few months ago we solicited feedback about a new bug tracking template that was in development. We got lots of great feedback and I’m happy to announce the template is available in the Access Getting Started screen in the business category and on Office Online.

There are several videos available that help you get started using it:

Ben Hodes (the template author) has a real knack for narration. We expect him to get a new job offer from MSNBC shortly but really hopes he says on the team. Seriously, I think Ben did a great job on this template and the training.

As always—let us know if you have any feedback and/or suggestions for improvements by taking the survey or send us email.

Bug database template beta available for free download

BenHodes — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:23:00 GMT

Around two months ago clintc made a post asking if anyone would be interested in a light-weight bug tracking template, and the response was overwhelming. Well, I am happy to announce that we have taken the time to put together just such a template, and better still, that we’re releasing a beta version to get your feedback.

Bug tracking means a lot of things to a lot of people, and part of our previous blog post was to elicit feedback to help us scope the application and it’s features to provide the best bug tracker for the most people. That being said, the responses were pretty varied but proved to be very useful.

After working it through we decided to go with a lightweight bug tracking application that should be very easy to use with very little learning curve. One thing that we wanted to avoid was duplicating a complex bug tracking solution such as Bugzilla, as we saw a lot of value in keeping it simple and quick to load up and go.

All in all, we are very happy with the results, and look forward to feedback on how it can be even more useful.

Here is a quick screenshot of the details form:

Download the template and then be sure to send us your feedback and comments.

The Contacts Template Redesign: Listen, Iterate, and Educate

Clint Covington — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:38:00 GMT

Today’s guest writer is Josh Meisels, our intern this summer. He is heading back to school next week but wanted to share information about one of his summer projects.

Access 2007 made a huge push to create useful, ready-to-use database templates that users could download from Office Online and get started with Access. The number of downloads exceeded our expectations (the Access 2007 contacts database is downloaded about 60,000 times a month). We thought the templates were pretty good; however, in January we linked each template to a feedback survey. From the results we derived a Net Promoter Score that indicated we had plenty of room to improve (see Clint’s post on Provide Feedback).

When I began my internship on the Microsoft Access team 3 months ago, my first assignment was to redesign one of the poorest performing, and yet the most downloaded template, the Contact Management Database. Many people provided email addresses as part of our survey, so I contacted them and called 10 who ran the gamut from students to professors, receptionists and business professionals. Each had a different, personal story to tell about his or her experience with Access and with the contacts template. The best part was how surprised people were when they learned that Microsoft actually cared what they had to say!

From feedback, I compiled a list of template limitations, including

Inability to group or categorize contacts
Too hard to search for people
Issues importing addresses from Outlook
Availability of help on adding fields

The last one came up repeatedly; and for an Access newbie, just learning how to add a field can be a challenging task.

To bring help into the application, we created a custom “Getting Started” screen that pops up when you first open the template.

It provides links to online help and two custom videos about using and modifying the contacts template. The videos have received rave reviews, not just because they help users learn to work with the Contacts Template, but also because they teach widely applicable Access skills that, unlike traditional help, appeal to visual learners.

In addition to listening to customers, we also watched them. We conducted a usability study with people who were familiar with other Microsoft offerings like Excel, but who had never used Access, and we asked them to perform tasks with the template. For two days we watched and learned how to make the template even easier to use and more visually appealing. Changes that resulted from the study were the addition of a text-based summary of our videos, and clearer video labels. Over the next few weeks we made incremental changes to the template so what we released would be as clear and usable as possible.

Two weeks ago we released an updated version of the Contacts Template. Our satisfaction scores shot up 64%! The team is pretty excited. People especially like the new video help. Here’s what folks are saying about the videos:

I learned the basic steps in Access. Now I can play a little with the program so I can learn much more about it.
I have been struggling with how to add to the information but watching the video solved my problems
It makes getting started easier
Awesome! Short and concise yet detailed enough to give insight as to the functionality capabilities. I think I can do this!
Anytime I can visually see how to----it simplifies the learning process. Thanks
The hard to find but essential techniques was demonstrated in very good detail. (means, no more hair pulling and stress on my part) Thanks!!
Thanks!! I learn better from SEEING something done, and this was most definitely helpful!!

Don’t take other people’s word for it. Check out the template here and the videos.


Using the Contacts Database	Modify the Contacts database

More important than the positive words about the videos and the NPS increase for the template is the overall impact or research has had on the product. The last question we asked in our feedback form was whether users would recommend Access to a friend. This isn’t rating the template anymore, but rather the overall experience with Access after using the template. The NPS score we derived from this improved 35% after releasing the new template!

Here are the three things we took away from our experience redesigning the contacts template:

Listen: Listen to a broad range of customers and ask for feedback.
Iterate: When you think you have a great design, make it even better. Then make it better again.
Educate: Remember the Chinese proverb, “give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime?” It’s true. Help is a feature and should be accessible and comprehensible no matter the user’s skill level. Sometimes making a feature more opaque isn’t the best way to go. Instead, try to teach users how to make the most of your application and be transparent about how things work rather than adding unnecessary layers of abstraction.

If you are looking for ways to apply this to your own applications, consider the addition of a feedback form, an NPS score calculation and connect with people who struggle with your product. Also, before you release a feature, do ad-hoc usability testing. Ask a friend or co-worker to perform a few tasks; and watch where they click, what confuses them and what makes them happy. Finally, make help a part of your application by adding videos – the Office Labs Community Clips recorder is a great tool for this.

Customer feedback to improve product design

Clint Covington — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:07:00 GMT

Access 2007 in many ways is a different product for end users. In previous releases it was very difficult to be successful creating a new application without using help, taking a class, reading a book, or asking the community—information workers that wanted to use the product had to really dive into the product. Sure we had some templates but there weren’t discoverable and the team hadn’t made big investments in that area. Internally, we referred the Access 2003 boot screen as the gray screen of death.

The new Getting Started screen is introducing the product to a much broader range of information workers that don’t have previous experience in Access.

We watched carefully the comments and ratings through Office Online. Everything indicated that people were getting lots of benefit and the template hit the mark and were successful at bring a new class of users. However, the team felt we needed to understand with more clarity how successful the templates were as well as gather more information about our users. We have fairly good communication channels with enterprises through our sales force and professional developers through the MVPs and the blog. The user we didn’t feel was accurately represented in our feedback loop was new users and information workers who were primarily focused on their day job where Access is a tool for helping them make decisions and track stuff.

About 8 months ago we updated our templates to include a Provide Feedback option to the main application form.

This link takes people to a short 10 question survey that utilizes the Ultimate Question methodology to determine customer loyalty and gathers some additional information about our users. The results of the research indicated there were lots of room to improve the template experience for new users.

One of the questions ask people if they would talk to a person on the team about their experience. Since the release of the survey the team has called all types of users to talk about Access on a regular basis. We typically write up our results and share them with the entire team. This process has enabled us to incorporate feedback from many of our users that previously haven’t had a voice in product design decisions.

The team has been able to leverage this information in a number of ways. Early calls indicated many people were having trouble printing labels because the Address field didn’t show up. Turns out the label wizard filters our memo fields and the address field type was a memo (consistency with SharePoint). We were able to quickly release a update to all the templates with a fix. The great thing about the Office Online integration for templates is we can release a fix without having waiting for an SP.

We recently took it one step further. Josh Meisels, our summer intern, used the information to contact a number of people who were using the contacts template. Through the summer we were able to make a number of changes that have been extremely well received. Josh will tell you more about that tomorrow.

Overall, the template survey enabled us to make a connection with an important customer that wasn’t represented in our feedback chain.

2007 templates have been updated

Clint Covington — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:53:41 GMT

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 our memo fields from the list of fields. This was a pain point with many users who couldn't figure out why the Address field didn't show up when using the report Label Wizard. Jeff Conrad even created a special FAQ page to explain to users why they couldn't see their Address field in the wizard dialog pages and how to change the data type back to Text.

We revised the 24 English online Access 2007 templates with this change (these templates also show up in the Getting Started Screen). Any table in any of the templates that used Memo as the data type for the Address field has now been changed to Text. The next time anyone downloads one of these templates, they shouldn't have problems printing labels.

If you have other suggestions for the templates--send us an email. We would love to hear from you.

New Vehicle Maintenance and Expense Reports database available

Clint Covington — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 08:15:05 GMT

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 vehicle maintenance database to track multiple vehicles and their expenses and future repairs.

There is also a new article Selecting and using the Access 2007 templates that is a rework of content from several longer articles to help users start with selecting a template and options for adding data, and some ways to customize.

Enjoy!

Charitable Contributions Templated

Zac Woodall — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 02:32:26 GMT

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 to create the new Charitable Contributions Template. Here's more in his own words:

The new Access 2007 Charitable Contributions template is now ready. You can download it from Office Online or access it in the Featured Templates section of the Getting Started page in Microsoft Access).
I am interested in getting feedback on your experiences using this template. I’d love to see how you are using it and to discuss ways we can improve our templates.
Let me start by talking about this template. You can use it to:

Manage several campaigns simultaneously
Track fundraising events for a large campaign
Track donations and pledges made by contributors
Group donations by campaigns or events
Assign tasks to your employees
Delegate employees as primary contacts for campaigns, event, and contributors
Set fundraising goals and track amount raised

I’ll explain some of the details of this template. For those of you who are familiar with other Access 2007 templates, I have used a lot of great ideas from them. These include exposing related forms and reports in the toolbar, using safe macros actions for all events, and displaying records in split-forms. I have also added the main home-page with links to improve the overall navigation.

Navigation

The template has an easy-to-use navigation homepage which provides quick links to the most commonly used forms and reports. As shown in the image below, it can be used to manage tasks as well. You can give feedback on the template using the "Provide Feedback" button in the quick links section of the page. The buttons on the header section provide access to view the list of all records for each table. I’ll explain the purpose of these tables later. Here’s a screenshot of the startup form.

Forms

As with all of our templates, we have a List form to show all records and a Details form to view details of a single record. This format allows easy access to view all records in a datasheet form or to zoom into the details of one of those records. The Details forms can be viewed by clicking on the link for a particular record in the List forms.
The Campaigns List and the Events List have a histogram to compare the fundraising goals for the ongoing campaigns and events. Related items are shown as sub-forms within the details form, for example, events and donations for a campaign. I’ve also added a new “Home” button in the header section of each List form. You can use this to navigate back to the main-page and to keep the number of open tabs low.
Here’s an example of the Campaign List form with the histogram. You can use the histogram to compare the total amount that you need to raise for each ongoing campaign.

Here’s what the Details form for a campaign looks like. The other detail forms follow the same format and layout for consistency.

Schema

The template consists of six tables: Campaigns, Events, Contributors, Donations, Fundraising Tasks, and Employees. The following image shows the relationships of these tables:

Here’s what the tables are for

Campaigns table: tracks all the campaigns
Events table: tracks independent events and those that are part of campaigns
Contributors table: keeps a record of all the people who have already donated or are potential donors
Donations table: tracks both unpaid pledges and paid donations
Tasks table: keeps a track of all the tasks that need to be done for a given campaign or event
Employees table: stores a list of all the employees of the organization that will use this database. It is meant to track the following:
- The owner of a campaign/event/donation is the employee who is assigned to the campaign/event/donation. He/She is the "go-to" person and responsible for managing funds and contributors for that campaign.
- The primary contact for a contributor is the employee who is responsible for maintaining the relationship with the contributor and is the main contact when dealing with the contributor.

Some interesting notes about the database. I’ve included these to try and answer some common questions you might have about the schema-design of the template.

Campaigns vs. Events: Events can either be assigned to campaigns or can be independent. Independent events are basically fundraisers that don't belong to a campaign but are held to raise money towards a goal. A campaign is a collection of events and donations. Contributors can fund a campaign by donating money at an event which was held for that campaign.
Managing donations: Donations can be made towards campaigns and/or events. Tracking donations that were made for events is now possible too. People who need to track donations but not campaigns can use this template by ignoring the Campaigns section.
Employees: Although employees are the primary contacts and owners of all the records, this field is not required in any of tables. If the organization does not want to track the employees or does not have many employees to track, they can ignore this field and use the rest of the database.
Constituencies: Contributors can belong to one or more categories (for example: parent, alumnus, charity, organization etc.) These categories are identified as constituencies for a contributor. The constituencies are stored as a multi-value field within the table. This enables sorting and categorizing contributors by the group they belong to.

Reports

The database contains the following reports:

All Contributors: Lists all the contributors in the system
All Donations: Lists all donations and pledges grouped by the campaign they belong to
All Employees: Lists all the employees in the system
All Events: List all events grouped by the campaign they belong to
All Tasks: Lists all the tasks in the system
Completed Campaigns: Shows all the Campaigns where Status = Completed
Ongoing Campaigns: Shows all the Campaigns where Status <> Completed
Pending Tasks: Shows all the Tasks where State <> Completed
Unpaid Pledges: Shows all Donations where Paid <> True
Upcoming Events: Shows all Events where Start Date >= Current Date

Here’s an example of the Pending Tasks report.

You can give feedback to Microsoft about your experiences using the template or about things you would like to see improved in templates by clicking on the “Provide Feedback” link on the main-page (shown below).

You can click on the “Take the Online Survey” link to go to a short online survey where you can tell us about your experience, rate the template, and write any comments or questions you might have.

Although Anshul's internship has come to an end, this feedback link is still live, and we'd still love to get feedback on the design of this template through the feedback form. Thanks all, and happy templating!

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.

Millions of blog hits and template downloads

Clint Covington — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:16:00 GMT

The last couple days I have stumbled across some numbers that give you an idea about the popularity of our favorite desktop engine.

3 million hits on this blog last month
2.8 million 2007 template downloads world wide since launch

Pretty cool!

New Access 2007 Articles on Office Online

Zac Woodall — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 20:33:00 GMT

Thanks to Jeff Conrad on the Access test team for this:

Office Online now has published four articles with material pulled from the Microsoft Office Access 2007 Inside Out book. This enormous book, published by Microsoft Press, is co-authored by Access MVP John L. Viescas and recent Microsoft hire Jeff Conrad. You can find these new articles at the following links:

Exploring a desktop Access 2007 database:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA102326851033.aspx

Create an Access 2007 database using templates:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA102326861033.aspx

Build forms in Access 2007 using design tools:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA102326841033.aspx

Automate applications with macros in Access 2007:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA102326831033.aspx