Before Access 2010, Access supported a wide variety of expressions in different areas of the application.  Tables and fields, queries, form and report properties, controls, and macros can all use expressions to evaluate data or logic to drive the behavior of an application. In the past, each of these contexts in which an expression is used have shared a single, common expression evaluation engine. This means that no matter where you use an expression, the functions and operators available to you will likely be the same. Things change when you start to build web databases with Access 2010.

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I described the new Access UI in this post and this post way back in March. Now I'll run through how you program the ribbon UI using VBA. In a future post (we're still working out the content) I'll do another post on how to do the same thing using macros (so the app will run in disabled mode). Customized Ribbons The ribbon UI presents a ton of new flexibility for us creating Access and for you building apps on top of Access that wasn't there before. As described in the posts on the ribbons, there...

In the first Access blog post, I noted that Access 12 has a new database engine, but one derived from and very similar to the old Jet engine. There were a bunch of questions & emails about what we did, why, and what it means, and it will take me more than one post to get through everything so please be patient. In this post, I’ll cover what how the database engine fits into Access and how the new is different from Jet. In future posts, I’ll talk about the Access data security model and other...

Today’s guest blogger is Edwin Blancovitch. Edwin is president of Advanced Developers.net , creators of Easy Payroll , a software package to manage your human resources, payroll, scheduling, time and attendance needs. When you're designing a form or report, you may want to provide a method for a user to easily use a command that applies only to the correct context. One way to do this is to create a custom shortcut menu and apply it to a form report, or control. The shortcut menu appears when...

One of the key things databases provide is the ability to sort, filter, and group data. Of course Access provides this today but Access 2007 makes it quicker and easier to sort, filter, and group data in forms, reports, and tables. Today we'll look at just filtering and basic sorting in a form datasheet - in this case we'll use the Issue List form from the Issue tracking application. In addition we're only looking at the top-level UI for sort and filter. Next post I'll go through the new grouping...

One of the coolest new features in Access 2007 is the ability to gather data through emailed forms. These forms can be used to either update existing data or to gather new data. The forms can either be rich InfoPath forms that show up in-place in Outlook 2007 email messages, or they can be very simple HTML forms that can be completed by users of practically any email client. When the forms are returned to your machine, the data is extracted from the email message (either automatically or manually...

Someone asked me about using the Attachment data type in Access 2007 for a specific task. They wanted to use it as a simple data type where it would only be used to hold 1 file per record, and they wanted to be able to open the file in an external application using a button on a form instead of using the Attachment control on a form. Given these constraints, I was created a simple VBA function for doing just that: Public Function OpenFirstAttachmentAsTempFile(ByRef rstCurrent As DAO.Recordset, ByVal...

Hello! I’m Erik Rucker, and I’m the Group Program Manager for Microsoft Access. I’ll be using this blog to share details about the upcoming version of Access, which we’re currently referring to as “Access 12”. I’ll be working with other folks on the Access team on these posts, and so in addition to the product you’ll get a chance to meet some of the people who are building it. The development team for Access 12 is about 7 times as large as the one for Access 2003, and this has allowed us to do a...

The Access team is proud to introduce the Access 2013 public preview, which will make it easier than ever for everyday people to organize the data in their lives and businesses using Access apps. This release focuses on bringing Access databases to the web through Office 365. We've made lots of improvements to help you build professional apps more quickly than ever. In addition, your data is now stored in a full-fledged SQL Server database for speed, reliability, and extensibility.

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Last week we looked at sorting and filtering in forms. This week we'll look at sort, filter, and group in reports and see the new tools we've got to make building reports quicker and easier. The next post will look at the new interactive reports (instead of print preview, there's now a "report view") and how sorting and filtering work there. There will be a week off next week while I'm out of town on vacation, so this will be at the end of the month. Grouping and Sorting in Reports Access has always...