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  Welcome To The Access Unlimited Newsletter - Edition 26
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Access Unlimited is an email newsletter that provides free tips, help and information for skilled Microsoft Access users and related software disciplines.

Produced by Garry Robinson from Sydney, Australia.

In this edition,
SEARCHING THROUGH MULTIPLE EXCEL WORKSHEETS
GIVE OUTLOOK A TUNEUP
WINZIP 8.0
FOUR FOOT GATORS
WRITING AROUND WORD PICTURES
DOES AN ACCESS 97 SUBFORM HAVE ANY RECORDS IN IT.
BALLOON FLYING WITH OFFICE XP
GOOD READING AND USEFUL SITES
ACCESS BUGS FIXES
OFFICE XP - A FIRST LOOK

~~~~~~~
SEARCHING THROUGH MULTIPLE EXCEL WORKSHEETS

In Excel 97, when you click on the Find option, it will only ever work on the current opened Spreadsheet. But if you hold down the control key and click on the worksheets at the bottom of the screen, you will select multiple worksheets. Now when you run Find, it will search all the worksheets that have been selected.

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FOUR FOOT GATORS

One of the jobs most enjoyed by "Ed" is assisting other programmers with the techo stuff. One of my clients in Houston though came up with a good email whilst we were working on a project recently.

"Going alligator hunting in about an hour. Air boat and all that. Should be exciting for the cousins that are visiting from overseas. They were kidding about seeing some alligators, so they think we are going to an old plantation home, which is true, but after that its in the air boat and off into the swamps to chase the gators and snakes. Its kind of exciting jumping out of the boat and grabbing the gators ( don't try that if they are over 6'), the snakes are a bigger challenge cause they are fast, but a quick jurk on the tail usually works.. Will spend the night in New Orleans and install what I can tomorrow. "

2 days later he wrote

"Better make it 4' and I wasn't much more successful with the installation (client's network is a real zoo) than I was with the gators, nothing other 3' and two 5' water snakes.

But our intrepid programmer also did something neat with the screen dumps that he was storing in Word to explain bugs fixes and features that he wanted. Here is that little story.

WRITING AROUND WORD PICTURES

First copy the screen image using either the Print Screen button or the Alt-Print Screen button sequence. Paste the image into MS Word. (remember Paste Special).Now Right Click the picture, choose Format picture/layout/ and choose either "Square" or "Tight" and you can them move the picture wherever you want it and can also size it. "Tight" causes the text to follow the contour of the picture, so if you have white space on the sides, it will fill it in with text. The text will flow around the picture so if it's in the horizontal center of the page you will have text flow on both sides, assuming there is enough space between the picture and the margins on each side. Push the picture to the left margin and the text will flow to the right & visa versa.

~~~~~~~
DOES AN ACCESS 97 SUBFORM HAVE ANY RECORDS IN IT.

Here is a little code snippet to help you find out if any data exists in a sub form.

In the main form, place the following code under a button. SubFormControl is the name of the object on the main form that holds the subform in it. Its name may differ from the actual subform name.

Dim rst As DAO.RecordSet
Set rst = Me![SubFormControl].Form.RecordsetClone

If rst.RecordCount = 0 Then
MsgBox "Nothing in sub form"
Else
MsgBox "Total Rows = " & rst.RecordCount
End If
Set rst = Nothing

~~~~~~~
BALLOON FLYING WITH OFFICE XP

A reader asked

I enjoyed your article in the May edition of SmartAccess. Does your code work with OfficeXP? Microsoft says that the office assistant is "no longer necessary" but have they removed support for it in Access 2002?

Office XP turns off the office assistant so that using the balloon object with XP is disabled. That means that the code that I demonstrated in that article does not work. But you can turn on the Office Assistant using the following send keys visual basic code in Access 2002

SendKeys "%HO"

Or you can manually click on the Help Menu - Show Office Assistant

Anyone has any better suggestions, I would be glad to know.

~~~~~~~
GOOD READING AND USEFUL SITES

Over the last few months, commercial reality has hit both the Smart Access and the MS Office Pro web sites. Smart Access no longer has the first article from every month free and MS Office Pro also limited its very free website down to a small amount of free content.

But do not despair, both www.smartaccessnewsletter.com and www.msofficepro.com are well represented at MSDN with a free article being added every month. So try these following two links and look for the Table of Contents on the LHS to guide you through those free articles

An article on running a whole workgroup's email through Access. Click Here

An article on how you can use VBA in Outlook to sift through those piles of emails. Click Here

Another Access Web site that is featured at MSDN is Inside Microsoft Access. There are few good free stories here including this one on selectively transferring any column and row from an Access table to Excel

http://www.elementkjournals.com/ima/
http://www.elementkjournals.com/ima/0107/ima0171.htm

Microsoft explains all about why .Net now is all about XML services. Or in other words, we know its good for you so please buy it.
http://www.microsoft.com/net/xmlservices.asp

If you are into VB API's, then this is a site worth a look.
http://www.allapi.net/

~~~~~~
ACCESS BUGS FIXES

One:

One of the developers whom I provide programming guidance to was developing for a client who had Access 97. Unfortunately the developer only had Access 2000. When he delivered the software to the client, he used the Convert to Access 97 option. This ended up with reference issues on one of his client PC's. These were difficult to resolve. A suggestion I came up with was to create a brand new Access 97 database at the clients and import all the objects from the converted Access 97 into the brand new database. Hey presto. It worked !!! Lesson from this exercise, test back conversions on your delivery PC's at regular stages throughout the project.

Two:

Owen Jenkins had a lot of trouble with amending tables and the 'already open exclusively' error in Access 2000.

Turns out the machine had McAfee Safe and Sound running. If you're not aware of it, it's an automatic backup program which backs up data as you modify it and puts it into a single file on the hard drive which you can access with a drive letter. Anyway, you can specify the file types to back up. I just unticked a box next to mdb files, and the problem was solved! A whole day's work! I wish I'd worked it out a 9am!

~~~~~~
DATA MINING / GRAPHING SOURCE CODE

If you are interested in technology that shows the drilldown and multi data-source graphing process in Access, why not consider the

"GR-FX Programmers Pack"

which has been upgraded to include not only all the source code for the popular Graf-FX graphing tool plus some new programming libraries called Graf+FX.

http://www.vb123.com/explore

Purchase the software from

http://vb123.com/orders/

Update: New versions of Graf-FX released in July include a restyled user interface.

~~~~~~
WRAPPING THIS EDITION UP - OFFICE XP - A FIRST LOOK

Recently I installed Outlook, Access and Word from Office XP. Firstly the registration process of the new software with big brother was very painless. More importantly for all of you that still have to support older editions of Access and other application when you perform the upgrade. Be very careful doing the installation. The default setup is to wipe out the old versions of your Office software.

One of the things I became interested in was the speech recognition software. After very little training of the speech recognition algorithm, I did manage to get the machine to recognize words. But there is a real catch with this very substantial addition to the Office suite. It runs like an absolute pig on a 600MHz Celeron laptop with 128 meg of Ram. I would estimate that you would need 3 times the performance of this grade of machine to make it work correctly. That said, I have seen enough of the speech recognition software that I believe it will make programming and writing more interesting. The software even includes recognition of commands inside the VBA project of Access 2002. I successful managed to get the software to do useful things like "Down" to go down a line, "Home", "End" and a few other successful navigation movements. The fact that speech recognition works inside the programming environment is testament to the effort that Microsoft have placed on this addition to the Office suite. And I will be purchasing a new computer because I think that it will improve my productivity.

My very early conclusions on Office XP are that I really like the changes to the User Interface and the help is far easier to use than "silly old clippy".

Also welcome to the 200 or so new signups since the last edition.

Ed. Garry Robinson

Postscript: As soon as I started email Mail Merge with Word XP, I released that it does not work at all well due to some very questionable security provisions within Outlook XP. If you are upgrading, make sure that you keep Word 2000 or 97 or you will not be able to do a decent sized email mail merge.

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Garry Robinson - Software Consultant
 

 
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