Welcome To The Access Unlimited Newsletter - Edition 68   
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Access Unlimited is an email newsletter that provides Tips, Tricks and Techniques for skilled Microsoft Access users and people working in related software disciplines.

Produced by Garry Robinson (known below as "Ed") from Sydney, Australia.

The End Of An Era – Smart Access Gets A New Owner

Smart Access, a magazine many of the readers will be familiar with, will now be produced by a company called Eli Journals. As this will involve a new editorial team, I would like to thank Peter Vogel for his many years of editing Smart Access. In my view, his efforts have been primarily responsible for the most consistently useful magazine ever produced on Access. Three cheers from me. To let you have a final taste of the work of the old crew, the first link below allows you to read an article I wrote with Helen Feddema that is free for read on the Smart Access Site. Other recent links from our RSS news feed also follow.
 

27/04/2006 Denormalisation and Normalisation Of Access Data
Normalizing your data design is an essential part of creating a database that can be easily updated. However, Garry Robinson found it necessary to denormalize his data to provide the users with a user interface that met their needs...

Helen Feddema approaches the same problem from a different direction as Garry, but this time manages her data to provide the users with the reporting output that met their needs.

8/04/2006 Differences between Access and SQL Server
Useful page of differences between Access and SQL Server

16/03/2006 MS's Access 12 Blog - WYSIWYG Form Authoring and UI Issues
Discussions on new interface designs and forms in Access 12 to make them more modern.

 

21/03/2006 UK Access User Group National Seminar
The Access User Group is proud to announce that two of the world's leading exponents of Microsoft Access will be presenting at our national seminar in May. Based in the USA, Luke Chung is the CEO of FMS and recently acclaimed "Access Hero" by Microsoft at the Access 10th Anniversary celebrations. Based in Canada, Peter Vogel has written numerous database books and is the editor of the definitive magazine for Access developers, Smart Access.

The running order for the day is as follows;

" Keynote: The Ten Things We Love (and Hate) About Access
" Where Access Fits in the Overall Database Strategy of an Organization
" Building Applications in Access: Now and the Future
" Linking Access to Visio
" Access Development Tips and Techniques
" Getting Data Fast in Access
" So, What Is Sharepoint Exactly?

Wednesday 10th May 2006, 8.45am to 4.30pm
 

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29/03/2006 Basic Error Handling
Professional applications need to include error handling to trap unexpected errors. By using a consistent error handler, you can make sure that when crashes occur, the user is properly informed and your program exits gracefully. Basic error handling just hides the default behavior and exits the program. Advanced error handling can include all sorts of features such as saving information about the cause of the error and the environment at the time, attempts to address the problem, and information for the user on what they need to do next.

Read More

30/04/2006 New Version of Workbench For Microsoft Access Released
Building support for ADP files (compacting, favorites and backups mainly). Workbench now works with databases that have been hidden in windows explorer.

Added a new button to make it easier to include software database version information in the main forms of databases. Button can be found in the Deliver form. Next version of Workbench will allow you to query the database (very basic). It remembers the last SQL entered for each database. Handy for things like querying the internal userlogs. Introduced a New link on the current tab to make it easier to fire up a new Workbench window.

29/03/2006 Office 2007 will ship in 2007
Microsoft gave official word this week that the next version of Office will coincide with the general availability of Windows Vista in January 2007.
Previously, both products had been scheduled for release in the second half of 2006.

28/03/2006 Active X Controls On Web Pages May Not Work
Microsoft is releasing a software update to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 for Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1). This update changes the way in which Internet Explorer handles some Web pages that use ActiveX controls. Examples of programs that use ActiveX controls include the following:

Adobe Reader
Apple QuickTime Player
Macromedia Flash
Microsoft Windows Media Player
Real Networks RealPlayer
Sun Java Virtual Machine

22/03/2006 Manual Table Relink by Danny Lesandrini
There are times when we have to trust the users with the awesome responsibility of pointing to the correct database. Perhaps it is only at the initial setup of the client application, or perhaps your program allows users to connect to different databases. Whatever the reason, at times you need to allow for manual table relinking.


17/03/2006 4:38 PM How to transpose data in Access
Want to know how to make rows columns and columns rows, then read this article from Microsoft.

17/03/2006 3:02 PM Archiving Data (To Excel)
Helen Feddema discusses a procedure that exports data to be archived to an Excel worksheet, and then removes the exported records from the Access tables:

Part two of the article can be found here.
http://office-watch.com/access/archtemplate.asp?8-03

16/03/2006 7:47 PM MS's Access 12 Blog - More on Creating Tables
One of the key problems that new users have in Access is creating well-structured databases. The tracking apps will help by creating normalized schemas for the most common applications, but many users will need to build their own databases without starting from the tracking apps. Table Templates provide a way for users to get well-structured single tables that they can easily add to their own applications. There's a simple entry point on the ribbon:


10/03/2006 5:42 PM Repair Damaged Access Databases
vb123.com now offers an online repair system for Access databases. Included in the latest version is the option to only repair tables rather than fix the whole database. This reduces the cost of exercise. The system is setup so that your data is encrypted and in most cases, you should be able to recover a corrupt database in less than 30 minutes elapsed time.