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  Welcome To The Access Unlimited Newsletter - Edition 57  
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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 (known below as "Ed") from Sydney, Australia.

In this edition

Feature Article - How to Speed Up Your Access Database
Making Data Upper/Lower Case
Scatter Plots
Why XML Is Very Important To Microsoft
A Review of the Workbench
Collapsing Menus
Microsoft Trademarks
Adobe V’s Microsoft – Start Your Engines
The popular GOOD READING section once again.

Feature Article - How to Speed Up Your Access Database 

In this edition of Access Unlimited, I have arranged a special “Hidden Link” into an article at Pinnacle’s Smart Access web site.  This time around the article that is featured is Peter Vogel’s take on what makes Access databases go faster. Simply put, you can make an Access database go faster by concentrating on anything that reduces the clatter of the disk drive heads.

Click here to read Peter Vogel’s Article at the Smart Access Web site

Making Data Upper Case

Access has always been a product that really doesn’t care if data is stored in “UPPER” or “lower” case. Whilst this does make life simpler for us, it sometimes isn’t the correct solution. Unfortunately there is no real easy way to deal with this. In the following page, I will show how to the use the VBA StrComp function in Access 2000 or higher to do easy string comparisons and then change Case as appropriate.

http://www.vb123.com/Toolbox/05_access/upperlowercase.htm

You may also like to refer to the following article on Proper Case
http://www.asp101.com/samples/pcase_aspx.asp

     Corrupt Database?
    If you have a corrupt database, click here to find out what we do.

Scatter Plots

A reader wrote in “I need to be able to plot scattered data with no grouping in Access. Does Graf-FX allow this?  I do not want to sum anything.  This is scientific tested data, and all this summing is nonsense! Test number in the X, and the data in the Y.  They teach this graphing style in elementary school, but Access denies that this is a necessary function of a graphing utility.  I am sorry to vent, but I need this ability. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Ed replied.  To make a scatter plot, abandon the graph wizard and hand edit the Row Source query behind the graph to remove the Group By clause. Access graphs use the excel charting object, the difficulty is getting the query setup in the right fashion to extract the data in the right manner.  Anyway here are a couple of pages that may be of interest

http://www.vb123.com/Toolbox/00_Docs/spatialaccess.htm

http://www.vb123.com/Toolbox/99_graphs/scatterplot.htm

Why XML Is Very Important To Microsoft

In the next version of Office (known as 12), Microsoft has announced that the default document format for Office 12 will have an XML based structure.  Another way of saying this is that Microsoft will produce an Open but complex format of its core files which means that you will not need an Office license to create the files using non-Office tools. The file types have already been announced and they are

WordML    .docx
SpreadsheetML  .xlsx
PowerpointML  .pptx

Interestingly the Office 12 XML will include internal zip compression of blobs such as pictures that can occur in between the XML tags. Access is not mentioned in the XML announcements, no doubt all will be revealed soon enough for those stoic enough to go for the Office 12 beta program.  

Alan Cossey – A Review of the Workbench

Earlier in the month, Alan Cossey undertook to review the Access Workbench for the UK Access users group. Alan writes …

The Workbench is an administrative tool for Access. It does lots of things that we developers (and DBA's) have to do - or at least ought to do - and neatly puts these tasks together in a nice and simple interface. When you install it and open it for the first time, the impression is that there isn't much there and it is only when you get started with it that you realize the usefulness of the app.  Click to read more

Find the UK Access User Group http://www.ukaug.co.uk/

New In The Workbench. The Workbench now can find the Most Recently Used lists from all versions of Microsoft Access. Find out more

A Note From A Reader On Collapsing Menus

A possible tip for your newsletter, is how to turn off the annoying collapsing menus. It took me ages to find that Tools ~ Startup ~ AllowFullMenus is nothing to do with turning off the collapsing menus 'feature'. I eventually found the proper way to turn this off - not too easy because the property of the commandbar object is called the non-intuitve 'adaptive menus'. The setting goes Office-wide. To turn off in VBA code or in the Immediate Window (Control-G), copy the following code

Application.CommandBars.AdaptiveMenus = False

Joan Wild - Access MVP commented
You can do this without code using the menus View ~ Toolbars ~ Customize and click on the Options tab. One can check 'Always show full menus'.
 

 A Couple of Advertisements

Would you like to sell vb123.com software? If so then check out this page
http://www.vb123.com/orders/resellers.htm 

Garry’s Book now has 15 five star reviews at different web sites. Click here to READ what the Amazon readers have to say or even better if you are one of the 1000’s who have purchased the book, have your say.

Microsoft Trademarks

Do you have a web site or a product that is closely aligned with Microsoft Office or Microsoft Access. If so then you may get a visit from the legal rep from Microsoft to make sure that you comply with Microsoft trademark guidelines.

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/trademarks/officesystemguide.asp

Adobe V’s Microsoft – Start Your Engines.

Microsoft is off and racing in a new area by taking on Photoshop with a product called Acrylic. This is a vector-based graphic program acquired from a Hong Kong software house. Given the prices that Adobe gets away with, this should be a worthwhile battle. As part of this contest, Microsoft is also testing a new format to bump aside PDF. Beta version of Acrylic are available at: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/

On a slightly different note, a reader wrote in

I was browsing through some of the articles your link pointed to and I started reading the page on PDF creation from within Access.  The article gave some cheaper alternatives to Acrobat software and even mentions a free but difficult to install alternative.

May I direct you to another piece of PDF software, 100% free and very easy to install: it involves two files, one of which is an installation wizard.  The end result is a virtual PDF printer that can be used anywhere in the Windows environment.  The program is called CutePDF (find it with google) and is pretty basic - you don't get all the options you find in Acrobat, but you do get a good PDF document.  Kind regards,  Gabriel

GOOD READING

FTP from an Access database, Danny Lesandrini explains one technique
http://www.databasejournal.com/features/msaccess/article.php/3513061

Converting VB6 Code to vb.net – Two considered views of the problem
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/appdev/story/0,10801,102553,00.html

http://www.codeguru.com/Csharp/Csharp/cs_misc/designtechniques/article.php/c9891/

Simplify debugging Excel formulas – build your own iif parser
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1pkk,1,8d7j,dxd4,39gr,amjy

Add Google to your Web ASP.Net
http://www.ftponline.com/vsm/2002_08/magazine/columns/aspnet/

WRAPPING THIS EDITION UP – Leave that 97 database out in the cold

As most of our clients have moved forward to Access 2000 and beyond, we finally have decide to stop writing Access 97 databases for knowledge based tools such as The Toolbox. To ensure that these are still available to the Access 97 database community, we have frozen this collection as a single download so you can still profit from our collection.

The GR-FX Frozen Pack for Access 97 combines the Access 97 downloads from Garry's book on Access Security, the code from the Toolbox, Graf-FX with full source code and The Toolbox complete with many Access 97 downloads as of May 2005.

http://www.vb123.com/orders/ if you are interested in this library.

So thanks for reading our popular newsletter.  Feel free to make comments, copy the email to a friend or maybe even contribute to the next edition. And if you can, have a look at our software by using the Marketing section on the right hand side of this newsletter. If you really like this newsletter, why not purchase The Toolbox and you will get all the other newsletters and plenty more in a developer’s knowledge base tool with super searching facilities.

Garry Robinson - Software Consultant and Author
GR-FX Pty Limited
Sydney, Australia.
Ph +61 2 9340 7789 Fax +61 2 9665 8448
Software Resources http://vb123.com/

 --- The end of this edition of Access Unlimited ---

PS Don’t forget Garry’s BRAND NEW Workbench 4… Shutdown your database, send messages to users, colored icons, MRU's, lots of other relevant stuff.

http://www.vb123.com/workbench/

Click on this button to read the previous edition of Access Unlimited 
Published  2005-06