Microsoft Access Team Blog : User Assistance

Cool Tool Tips: A Better Control Tip

Mike Stowe — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:55:20 GMT

Tony D'Ambra of aadconsulting.com, maker of Access add-ins and switchboards, wanted to share his method for providing help to users when and where they need it.

In Access, the functionality of tool tips has not changed since they were introduced in Access 95 ten years ago.

In a free sample Access 2000 database Cool Tool Tips, which you can download here, I have implemented a more functional and controllable paradigm, which also looks great. If you have an application that is to any degree complex to use, Cool Tool Tips is an easily-implemented solution that avoids the need for a Help file, and keeps tips on the screen for however long they are needed by the user.

You can learn more about Cool Tool Tips here.

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

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

New Access training courses on Office Online

cdowns — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:52:47 GMT

Access Training writer Colin Wilcox has just finished up a series of query courses, available for free on the Access 2007 training courses page on Office Online. Here’s the whole set:

Find answers with queries

*Course*	*What you'll learn*
Queries I: Get started with queries	An overview of what queries are, what goes into them, and how to use them.
Queries II: Create basic select queries	How to create basic select queries by using a wizard or a designer.
Queries III: Use expressions and other criteria	How to use selection criteria and expressions — formulas that do more than math — in your queries.
Queries IV: Use functions and calculated fields in your queries	How to use functions to sum, average, or count data, and how to create calculated fields that display the results of an expression.
Queries V: Use "And", "Or", and "In" to set multiple conditions	How to use AND, OR, and IN logic to find records that meet multiple conditions, such as customers who also own their businesses.
Queries VI: Use wildcards in queries and parameters	How to use wildcard characters to find data and match patterns of characters.
Queries VII: Query multiple sources for data	How to query more than one table (or query) for data.
Queries VIII: Dealing with ambiguous joins	How to work around ambiguous outer joins, a problem that sometimes arises when you query multiple tables.

Have an Access Power Tip that you want to share? Send it to Mike and Chris at accpower@microsoft.com.

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

Video demo: Mail and email merge with Word

Clint Covington — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:05:54 GMT

Demo: Merge Access data with Word is now live on Office Online. I think this is a great short overview of a some what complicated process.

Enjoy!

Video demo of conditional formatting in reports

Clint Covington — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 03:12:54 GMT

The video Watch this: Highlight values on a report by using conditional formatting is now live on Office Online.

Enjoy!

Edited: October 31, 2008--updated link with correct URL.

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.

Article: Create a tab form with video demo

Clint Covington — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 07:27:11 GMT

The article Create a tabbed form, and the companion sudden demo Watch this: Create a tabbed form, are now live on Office Online.

Two new Allen Browne (MVP) articles

Clint Covington — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:25:00 GMT

The famous Allen Browne has published two new articles on Office Online.

Validation rules
Want to ensure that users enter valid data? Validation rules might be the answer. This article describes when validation rules are appropriate, and provides examples of commonly-used validation rules.

Relationships between tables
Once you learn how to design tables and create relationships between them, you can take advantage of the most powerful data storage and retrieval features of Microsoft Office Access. Read this article to see an example of relationships in action.

BTW – Firefox users are going to need to use IE to read these articles because of some funky mhtml file format we are using. Enjoy.

Access Power User Workshop (Dallas, TX)

Clint Covington — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 22:07:00 GMT

Mike Alexander an Microsoft MVP in Dallas is putting on an Access Power User Workshop October 20-21, 2008. The cost is $600 but Mike will offer a 30% discount for anyone that mentions they found it through the Access blog. Some of the topics that will be covered during the two-day workshop:

Advanced Query Tips and Techniques
Advanced UserForm Controls and Technique
Enhancing your Application GUI
Working with Recordsets
Doing some Cool Things with Windows APIs
Creating Dashboards Using Access Reports
Packaging and Distributing Techniques
Protecting your Access Applications
Creating Help Systems for your Access Applications
Creating an Installer Package for your Access Applications
Automating the creation of Excel Reports
Automating the Creation of PowerPoint Slides
Automating Outlook to send Emails and Manage incoming Mail

This looks like a great class to take your Access skills to the next level.

New Articles: AddMenu action, custom menus, shortcut menus, calculated fields

Clint Covington — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:38:01 GMT

The revised topic AddMenu Macro Action and the new topic Create custom menus and shortcut menus by using macros are now live on Office Online.

Also, MVP Allen Browne is joining in the publishing fun with Calculated Fields. This is the first of four Allen Browne articles that we will be publishing over the next few months.

Article update: IIF Function

Clint Covington — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:18:00 GMT

Chris Downs has revised topic IIf Function. The changes were in response to customer comments—the topic has been expanded to include more examples as well as information about using the function in queries.

Article: Top 10 reasons to use Access with Excel

Clint Covington — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:49:37 GMT

Mark Gillis, who has written extensively for Access and Excel, recently published, Top 10 reasons to use Access with Excel. In this article, there are also five “sudden demos” that work together to build a Customer database solution based originally on an Excel workbook. Here’s the table of contents and a summary of the five demos. Don’t forget to provide feedback. Enjoy!

Table of Contents

Excel and Access, better together, here's why
Reason 1: Copying an Excel worksheet to an Access datasheet
Reason 2: Sharing data by linking to an Excel worksheet from Access
Reason 3: Moving data by importing Excel data into Access
Reason 4: Connecting to Access data from Excel
Reason 5: Using Access reports with Excel data
Reason 6: Using Access forms with Excel data
Reason 7: Filtering, sorting, and querying in Access is so like Excel
Reason 8: Collecting data for Excel analysis by using Access
Reason 9: Doing a Mail Merge or creating labels
Reason 10: Combining Excel and Access with SharePoint technologies
Show Me Demos

Copy Excel customer data to Access, and then create a simple report by using the Report Wizard.
Link to Excel customer data from Access, and then create a detailed report by using Report Layout view in Access.
Import the Excel customer data into Access, delete the data from Excel, connect to the Access in Excel, and then create a Split Form in Access.
Collect new data from Access by using Outlook, create a query of customer addresses, and then create a mailing label report with bar codes.
Create a working database/workbook solution with a startup form and links to reports in Access.

Next Steps: Becoming an Access power user

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!

Article update: Create a form that contains a subform

Clint Covington — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:01:10 GMT

The revised topic Create a form that contains a subform (a one to many form) is now live on Office Online. The topic has been revised to include suggestions from the community, new graphics, rewritten procedures, and two new video demos.