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February 2007 - Posts

Toyota business lessons about humility, elegant solutions, and simplicity

I came across a couple of good articles about Toyota improving its designs and innovation process. Business Week, for example, recently published " Fighting to Stay Humble ". "To be satisfied with becoming the top runner, and to become arrogant, is the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 27, 2007 7:24 AM by clintc | 2 Comments
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New blog feed from the Access UA team

The user assistance team has put together a new blog that will highlight articles. Anyone interested in learning more about Access 2007 should find this useful. To subscribe to the Access feeds, see the article Get our RSS Feeds for Microsoft Office Access Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 24, 2007 2:02 PM by clintc | 16 Comments
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Tips and tricks for designing forms and reports - part 3

This is the final post of a three part series on Access Tips and Tricks provided by members of the Access team. This article focuses on non-obvious things new to the forms and report designers. The other articles in this series covered useful keyboard Read More...
Posted Friday, February 23, 2007 3:39 AM by clintc | 5 Comments

My favorite Access keyboard commands - part 2

I have a confession to make… I started hacking around in computers with Windows 3.1—never learned how to really use the command line. I know—I have fallen from grace for many of you developers. The mouse has been my friend. I’m trying to change and use Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 21, 2007 11:28 PM by clintc | 6 Comments

Web service and sample book database that uses Amazon's Web Services

Today’s guest writer is Access Program Manager Ric Lewis. Ric spent the last couple years with the Indigo team and just took an Access PM job. He is looking for some customer feedback on interesting web services scenarios. To start the conversation—he Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 20, 2007 11:33 AM by clintc | 22 Comments
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Tips and tricks from the Access team - part 1

I have been working on a three part series of non-obvious tips and tricks for using Access 2007. The other series will be on designing forms and reports and my favorite keyboard shortcuts. I put together a rough draft of this series and sent it around Read More...
Posted Monday, February 19, 2007 8:44 PM by clintc | 2 Comments

Open and respectful cultures create better designs

It’s not uncommon in the halls of Microsoft for a passionate Program Manager and brilliant Developer engage in verbal combat over design ideas. Anyone that has worked with talented people on a tough design problem knows that innovative design is hard—really Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 17, 2007 6:37 AM by clintc | 3 Comments

New Access 2007 books

Zac Woodall from the Access PM team pulled together a great list of books coming out on Access 2007. The last book he mentions is his own on templates. It is fun to see the authoring community really get behind this release. I'm sure we will see quite Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 15, 2007 9:17 PM by clintc | 1 Comments
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Macro improvements in Access 2007

Access 2007 and Macros One feature that might be surprising to many experienced developers is the re-invigoration of macros in Access 2007. We have done a bunch of work in this area that we think benefits end users and developers in some scenarios. If Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 15, 2007 12:01 AM by clintc | 10 Comments
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Seattle PI article "Microsoft Office 2007 sales twice that of previous version"

These quotes are nice to see. I'm also hearing from online communities an dramatic increase in posts on the new version. Microsoft Office 2007 sales twice that of previous version Microsoft Corp.'s new Office 2007 software produced almost twice the revenue Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 14, 2007 10:50 AM by clintc | 0 Comments
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Two new developer focused articles on Excel Services

Here are a couple developer focused articles on Excel Services that were published today. Extending the Excel Services Programmability Framework Summary: Optimize version 1 of the Excel Services programmability framework to extend Microsoft Office Excel Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 13, 2007 10:07 PM by clintc | 1 Comments
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The Craft of Design and Jonathan Ive

A couple months ago Business Week published an article about a talk "The Craft of Design" given by Jonathan Ive at the Radical Draft conference. http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0701300508jan31,0,4213554.story I found this paragraph about Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 13, 2007 11:58 AM by clintc | 0 Comments
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How to deploy trusted locations with group policy

Those of you that have started using Access 2007 know that you can get rid of the annoying security dialogs and message bar via trusted locations. A new article was just published that tells you how to configure trusted locations and trusted publishers Read More...
Posted Monday, February 05, 2007 9:54 PM by clintc | 2 Comments
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Four new user assistance topics on authoring reports

The UA team continues to crank our new content. The latest round is about creating reports. Maybe I should point them to my post on better looking reports … J Guide to designing reports Distribute a report electronically Change the appearance of a control Read More...
Posted Friday, February 02, 2007 9:35 PM by clintc | 2 Comments
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Good Experience blog post "Innovation and customer experience basics"

I'm a frequent reader of the Good Experience blog. These guys do a great job making me think about focusing on the simple things that customers really appreciate. A good experience is so much more than flashy UI--it is about knowing how your customer Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 01, 2007 8:19 AM by clintc | 0 Comments
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InfoWorld article - "Microsoft: Office training fears overblown"

This is a good interview with Chris Capossela, VP for Office Marketing. http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/31/HNofficetrainingfears_1.html This quote does reflect what we have seen in the Access world. Although, you can argue that the Access change Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 01, 2007 8:03 AM by clintc | 0 Comments
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