Sunday, March 28, 2004

CD has been claimed. Access Utilities CD v4 I have a factory 2nd to give away (normally US$29.95). First email received gets it: air-mail postage inlcuded.
Relationships: Your Key to Data Integrity in MS Access 2003 Sample Chapter from Alison Balter's Mastering Microsoft Office Access 2003

Creating MS Access Forms To Work with Excel Data from InformIT

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

MS Access Resources (Microsoft Access 2000 Technical Articles) This article provides an extensive list of MS Access 2000 development resources from the MSDN, TechNet, Knowledge Base, Office Update, and other Microsoft sites.

Access 2000 Run-Time Have you ever wondered why the Access 2000 runtime files (150mb) are massively larger than the Access 97 runtimes (12mb)? MS Knowledge Base article Q240959 explains why. But there is way of halving this bloat to 70mb by using the cut-down version of the Access 2000 runtimes


Wednesday, March 17, 2004

New MS Access and Office Downloads from Microsoft
Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) 2.8 Software Development Kit
Word 2003 Sample: Creating a Custom Spell Checker with Word 2003 and Visual Basic .NET
Microsoft Office XP Web Services Toolkit 2.0
Fabrikam 2.0 complete Microsoft® Office XP Sample Solution including .NET XML Web services

Other useful Microsoft links:
Microsoft Office Developer Center
Microsoft Office 2003 Web Services Toolkit

Training Center for Office XP

BLUR I use the excellent free browser-based MyBlog blog/news reader service from Boglines.com. A minor annoyance is that you view links in another browser window. So I developed a VB6 applet that allows you to read linked pages in the Reader - no more switching browser windows. I dubbed it BLUR for BLoglines.com MyBlog Unofficial Reader :)
Free Download

Free Data Recovery Reports on Corrupt MS Access databases from:
. http://www.msaccessrepair.com
. http://www.repair-access-database.com

Monday, March 15, 2004

Uncovering what's in the Office 2003 Resource Kit From TechRepublic.com


Focus on Microsoft Office 2003 DevX.com's CoDe Focus looks at InfoPath 2003, Smart Tags, creating your own Research Service, Web Parts, Windows SharePoint Services, and using Visual Studio in Office2003.


Database Journal Access News, tutorials, reviews, and discussion forums focused on Microsoft Access related issues. From Database Journal

Office XP Alternative User Input Update The Microsoft Office XP Alternative User Input Update: KB832668 updates the framework that is used to support advanced text services in OfficeXP.

Friday, March 12, 2004

Ezy Data 4 Out Now! Ezy Data lets you easily build Access databases and queries without MS Access. Special introductory pricing.

Thursday, March 11, 2004

Keep MS Access Form Controls in Focus A nice tip for Access2000+ from the TechRepublic Office Newsletter:

It can sometimes be difficult to find the cursor on a form. To clarify which control has focus, you can configure the control to display a different background color when the user moves to it. For example, you can configure the current control to appear with a yellow background. Follow these steps:

Open the form in Design View, and select the first control.
Go to Format | Conditional Formatting.
Under Condition 1, select Field Has Focus.
Click the Fill/Back Color button, and select yellow.
Click OK.

Set this condition for each control the user will tab to; in particular, set the condition on all controls that display text, such as text boxes and combo boxes.


Excel 2003 Samples: Expense Report and XML Schema This download from Microsoft contains a sample Excel spreadsheet to create a typical expense report and a sample XML schema file used to map XML elements to cells in the spreadsheet.

A Really Useful Registry Tool You know how tedious it is to register and un-register DLL’s and OCXs'. The Component Registering Tool (CRT) makes this as easy as three mouse-clicks. CRT is an applet bundled with a neat freeware add-in for VB6, TurboVBLite, a VB IDE enhancer. You don't need VB6 to take advantage of CRT. Just download the TurboVBLite .zip file and unzip to an empty folder. The CRT file, register.exe, is used to register the TurboVBLite .dll. The bonus is that running CRT adds two right-click menus in Windows Explorer: Register Component and UnRegister Component. To register/un-register any .dll or ocx. file in Windows Explorer, higlight the file and click Register/UnRegister from the right-click popup menu.

Tuesday, March 09, 2004

Office XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) Now Available
Download from Microsoft Office Downloads Site

Sunday, March 07, 2004

Tuesday, March 02, 2004

Using Classes and Objects in VB Another article from informIT.com
Free White Paper from Microsoft Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment
Database Normalization for the Real World Interesting article from informIT.com

Handy Tools for Office/Outlook Two free MAPI tools for Office developers from MAPILab.Com:
Save Mailing List: Allows export of contacts and user groups from Outlook 2000/XP Address Book into an Office mailing list.
MAPIProp: Component designed to read MAPI properties of CDO and Outlook objects.