Tag Archives: Access

Microsoft Action Pack: Vista and Office 2007

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Sooooo….the Microsoft Action Pack Q1 shipment arrives with Office 2007 Enterprise and Vista Business Edition upgrade. I spend 90 minutes digging bits of the Office 2007 beta 2 Technical Refresh out of my workstation before it allows me to install Office 2007.

Conversley, the Vista install has to be done over an existing XP install. WTF? That means if you want a clean install, you first have to install XP, then install Vista on top. This has to be a mistake, I’m sure that Bill’s boys and girls will be fixing this momentarily, right?

So I skipped Vista for now, and went with the Office 2007 Enterprise. This not only includes the usual suspects but a few others, like Groove, Expressions Web (The replacement for the unlamented FrontPage), Visio 2007, and a bunch of SharePoint stuff.

By my count there are at now at least three different technologies for “shared workspaces” offered by Microsoft; Groove, Sharepoint, and within some versions of Vista. Actually, four, because you can share OneNote notebooks in real time as well.

Before investing too much in the Microsoft versions, check out the Google Docs and Google Spreadsheet. I had a two-hour shared telephone conference with budget spreadsheet using Google Spreadsheet this morning, which worked out fine. It is a little funky when downloaded back into Excel, but it worked. And of course, we still like Backpack, I mean Basecamp.

Access 2007 Runtime

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Well, I wish I was pointing to the Access 2007 runtime, but I’m not, however, this Microsoft page, discusses several points of interest:

  1. The runtime will be available “shortly after the release to the general public of Microsoft Office Access 2007
  2. The runtime and developer extensions will be free downloads.
  3. The Extensions will include a packaging wizard, similar to the one for 2003, which optionally includes the runtime files, and any other files, necessary to create an MSI
  4. The Developer Extensions will include hooks for Source Code Control
  5. The Extensions will not include the Property Scanner or Customer Startup Wizard that were previously available in earlier versions.
  6. Links to the download locations will be posted on Office Online and the Access Developer Portal on MSDN.

SQL Command Box for Microsoft Access

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Among the many things I miss in Access from Foxpro is the ability to enter SQL statements on-the-fly into the command box. So, as a first cut, I created a form with a textbox and a button. The textbox holds the SQL code, and a button that calls a subroutine to stuff the code into a scratch query defined in the .MDB Queries collection.

There are lots of possible refinements, error checking, parsing of other commands, etc, but already I’m taken with this as it eliminates half the clicking around when doing SQL queries. Thanks to Martin Green’s Office tips for most of the code. Here is the VBA code for the command button. 

Private Sub cmdExecute_Click()
' The following code processes an on-the-fly SQL command
' entered in the text box. The command requires a "scratch"
' query be included in the database query collection. The code
' takes the SQL string, passes it to the scratch query, and
' then executes it.
' Code cribbed from Martin Green's Office Tips at
' http://www.fontstuff.com

Dim strSQL As String
Dim db As DAO.Database
Dim qdf As DAO.QueryDef

strSQL = Trim(Me.txtQuery.value)

'Here is the code which will apply the SQL statement to the query:

Set db = CurrentDb
Set qdf = db.QueryDefs("qryScratch")
qdf.SQL = strSQL
Set qdf = Nothing
Set db = Nothing

DoCmd.OpenQuery "qryScratch"
End Sub