Guest blogger Juan Soto explains how form variables can help improve the speed and usability of your Access forms, and shows how the same technique also works with subforms.

Extending Microsoft Access solutions with managed code has traditionally been a challenge. Visual Studio Shared Add-ins have been available for some time; however, managing the details of releasing Access.exe after closing an Access application can be tricky.

Read on to see how Office Add-in .NET developer Derrick VanArnam addresses the challenge by using a SurfaceController.

We're on track to deliver Office 2010 SP1 by the end of June 2011. We definitely recommend this update for all Office 2010 users. There has been great work put into this service pack that further enhances the performance and security of Access.

If your organization has important data stored in an older, unsupported database program, and other people in your organization need to work with that data on a regular basis, Access 2010 and Office 365 can help.

By migrating your data into Access 2010, and then publishing the database to your Office 365 site, you can provide your colleagues with continuous access to the data they need, and also ensure that the data is safely stored and backed up in the cloud.

Want to learn more? Keep reading....

If you've ever played the guessing game about where to put (or where not to put) an equals sign in an Access macro, this post is for you. The choice depends on whether you're dealing with an expression or a string, and getting it right is especially important if you plan to publish your database to Access Services on SharePoint.

Power Tipster Justin Farrell has posted a new tip on his blog, showing how to create and execute an update query by using a form and a small amount of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code. After following his tip, you'll be able to update a large number of records just by opening a form, typing or selecting a couple of values, and then clicking Update!

Microsoft has announced the release of SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v5.0, a family of products to further simplify the user experience in automating the migration of Oracle, Sybase, MySQL and Microsoft Access databases to SQL server or SQL Azure. Access users will be happy to learn that SSMA now includes support for international versions of Access and SQL Server, and it also gives you the ability to upsize Access databases to SQL Server "Denali".

Do you often have to summarize large data sets that have been extracted from your corporate database? Access can be very helpful when you need to work with a huge stream of data. We've published a new article that shows you how to make the data easier to import, analyze and summarize in reports, even if you don't consider yourself an Access expert.

One of the great things about Access is the variety of ways in which you can deploy a database application to a group of users. For example, if you're using Access 2010, you can publish a database to Access Services on a SharePoint server, enabling anyone with access to that server to use the database.

However, if that kind of deployment isn't an option for you, John Litchfield and Luke Chung of FMS, Inc., have published an article that shows you how to deploy an Access application by using the Terminal Services or RemoteApp components of Microsoft Windows Server.

How do you wrap text in Access? It's a question we hear quite frequently on Office.com. It may surprise you to learn that in most places where text is displayed in Access, text wrapping is on by default. The key is making sure there is enough room for the text to wrap.