A reader recently asked: Is there any way on Access 2007 to keep wizards and Switchboard Manager coding in VBA, any way developers "HAVE" to code for most applications. If a customer is buying an apllication from us, he is not going to trust what he bought?. Switchboard manager was great in its...

Sorry I haven't posted for a few weeks. I recently took an enjoyable NCL cruise with ports in Costa Maya, Santo Tomas De Castilla, Belize, and Cozumel. It was rewarding to spend a week playing hard with my lovely two little girls and Taunya. Love that!! Back to work... As I have mentioned in previous...

Can you believe, 3.5 million Access templates were downloaded from Office Online over the last 12 months?! This includes nearly 1 million Access 2007 and over 2.5 million Access 2000-2003 templates.Quite an uptake for such a new release. To capitalize on its popularity, we are back to work building...

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 were lots of fun to explore different designs and think creatively about how users interact with data. I wanted...

Yesterday I was looking at one of our templates and noticed the grid felt pretty busy. I wanted to come up with a design that softens the harshness of the gridlines yet was very readable. Here is what I ended up with... There are three easy steps to create this view (you can't do this in Access...

Access 2007 introduces a ton of new filtering tools that make it much easier to cut and slice data in different ways. I’m very happy about the new experience and think developers will spend far less time building filtering functionality because of the built in functionality. However, in all releases...

Lately I have been thinking a bit about report design and how to make reports look great without writing lots of line drawing code. Being a sports fan I have always thought sports sites do a good job making great looking reports. Personally, I couldn’t be happier about the Utah Jazz and their 12-1 start...

The past few days I have been working on an update to our Access 2000 Expense Report database. I'm interested if anyone has any feedback on how I can improve the design of the template. Let me give you a quick run through of the tables, forms, and reports. The schema includes four tables (Employees...

Let me start by writing about two customer visits I made early in the development of Access 12 that proved to be a good representation of some of our developer customers. The first, a large enterprise organization in the health industry arranged a full day where 10 business users (part-time developers...