Today’s guest writer is Lois Wang—PM for reports and version-to-version compatibility. I saw a question on the Access TechNet Forum the other day that I’d like to share with the community: “ I can't open accdb files in Access 2007 after they've been opened in 2010.” Access 2010 brings you many new features ( Data Macros , Calculated Columns, etc.) that Access 2007 does not understand. If Access 2007 goes ahead and open a Database created/modified in 2010, it will ignore...

Those of you transitioning to Access 2010 or 2007 from earlier versions of the product may notice the addition of a new property on the TextBox and ComboBox controls: Display As Hyperlink . You may wonder how this new property interacts with the existing Is Hyperlink property. I asked that question myself and found that the available documentation left some of my questions unanswered. So I’m writing this blog post to hopefully fill that void. First of all, if you’re happy with pre-Access...

Today’s guest writer is Steve Greenberg. The recent Access 2010 Theme’s post introduced you to the new Office themes inside Access. Now let’s show you some of the advanced things you can do with themes. The controls we are about to use can all be found to the left of the Design tab once you’re designing a form or report in design or layout view. In addition to using the out-of-the-box themes, you can also create your own themes. On the Design tab, choose Fonts | Create New...

Today’s guest writer is Greg Lindhorst, the person looking into how to improve Access and SQL Server for Access 15. Hello everyone! As Office 2010 nears shipping, we are starting to plan Office 15. One area that we are considering improving is our SQL Server support. Based on what I've heard from the community, that would be most welcome. Note that we are very early in planning, and considering many possible areas of investment, I unfortunately can't commit to any actual improvements at this...

In last week’s post, I talked at a high-level about some engine-level changes we’ve made to Access. This week, I’ll talk about changes to the security model that sits on top of that engine, and crosses into the UI as well. Starting next week, I’ll be going into the UI changes and all the other new stuff we’ve done in the product. Fewer modal prompts on boot (by default) and disabled mode In Access 11 based on the configuration of the machine when a user opened a database, he or she encountered 3...

Last week I wrote about the Office 2010 Technical Preview bevy of announcements. This post kicks off a series of conversations about what is new in Microsoft Access 2010. As a team, our passion is to help people quickly and easily create databases tailored to their needs with tools that are affordable, fast and efficient. Access 2010 is the next iteration in this quest. Here is a peek at some of the many changes you will see: Get started faster . One thing we have learned from the Access 2007 template...

One of the coolest new features in Access 2007 is the new Attachments data type. There are some very helpful dialogs for working with this data type, but there are also some useful additions to DAO to make automating the process of adding and saving attachments easy, too. What follows is some VBA code I've written that I hope you will find useful in understanding how do to this. First, let's look at the code to get a file into a table using DAO: The AddAttachment sub takes a reference to a DAO.Recordset...

Months ago I posted a three part tips and tricks series on Access 2007 on my personal blog . I recently got feedback that the series should be posted on the Access team blog--makes sense as this blog gets about 3 million more hits a month than my personal effort. -------------- I have been working on a three part series of non-obvious tips and tricks for using Access 2007. The other series will be on designing forms and reports and my favorite keyboard shortcuts. I put together a rough draft of this...

Today’s guest writer is Steve Greenberg, a Lead Program Manager on the team. Steve is responsible for form rendering and the new templates in Access 2010. Last week the team was privileged to host our MVPs at a conference here in Redmond. During our in-depth talks about Access 2010, some of these MVPs asked me about the new DoCmd and macro action called BrowseTo that we’ve introduced with Access 2010. I’ve written this post to demystify this strange new action. In short, BrowseTo...

Sorry for the lack of posts for the last while - we've been buried getting the next version of Access rolling. Clint Covington posted this on his blog the other day, but it belongs here as well, so here's the same information. I'll have a short series of posts in the next few days about details and availability for some cool new Access resources. I'll be able to resume the descriptions of Access 2007 in a few weeks, and can talk in (very) general terms about the future and how we build Access. Clint...