If you've taken a look at some web sites recently, you may have noticed an effect where items (usually images or videos) are brought to the foreground using an effect called a lightbox . The effect is used to dim (or sometimes lighten) the background of the active window while bringing another window to the foreground. The window in the foreground appears to have more prominence because the windows in the background have been dimmed or made transparent. Our friend Tim uses this on his site to display...

Chris Downs has revised topic IIf Function . The changes were in response to customer comments—the topic has been expanded to include more examples as well as information about using the function in queries.

Recently our friends over in Office Live have had major announcements about both the Office Live Workspace and Office Live Small Business products. Office Live Workspace announced global availability last Tuesday. It allows you to store your files and documents online and share them with others. In February, Office Live Small Business announced a major upgrade. It allows small businesses to build and maintain a web-site, market via e-mail and search engines and manage projects online. Here's a great...

I spent some time today updating the look and feel of the blog. We'd been running with Orange for quite a while, and it seemed like time for a change. We also decided it would be good to rename the blog to the Access Team Blog, because that name better reflects how we intend to use the blog (as an outlet for communications between you and the Access team). What do you think of the redesign? Comments are welcome!

We are thrilled to announce that Access 2010 is available in retail stores and online. The team has worked very hard to make it easier to track and report on your information, build your databases faster and easier than before, and access your data in new ways. Over the last few months, we have shared our excitement about the new features of Access 2010 , including Web databases, data macros, calculated columns, improved layouts, intellisense, themes, an updated navigation model, BCS(Business Connectivity...

Today’s guest writer is Neha Monga—the PM owner for the web compatibility checker. The Web Compatibility checker is a tool that allows users to check web compatibility of the tables and web objects. It is a useful tool to help you migrate existing applications to the Web. Access Server doesn’t support all the rich table schema, controls and properties that the Access client supports. If you create a new Web Database the design tools are optimized for creating objects that are compatible...

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. Regularly when we create databases for our customers we use continuous forms for data entry. The problem is, it’s often difficult for users to identify the record they’re working on a big continuous form with tons of records. I’ve found a way to overcome this in just a few just quick...

We're headed into our second coding milestone for the next release of Office (v.14). The stuff we're building is really amazing, and I can't wait until I'll be able to talk with you all about it in detail. For now though, as we ramp up for our next coding milestone, I'm going to have my hands pretty full getting our final designs in place. The upshot is that my post frequency is going to slow a bit. Please keep the feedback rolling in, I love to hear how things are going with your 2007 adoption and...

The Access team is looking for great people to help us turn Access 14 into the best Access release of all time! If you're passionate about Access (and you probably are since you're reading this) and you know you've got what it takes to create world class software that is used daily by millions of people around the globe, then we want to hear from you! This link will show you the current openings on the Access team. Right now we've got four openings, but the link should stay up to date with the most...

Some of you may have already seen this posted in Jensen’s blog.  Jensen is the GPM of the Office User Experience team and was the lead for the implementation of the Ribbon in Office 2007.  Last week at the MIX conference in Las Vegas, Jensen presented “The Story of the Ribbon”.  It’s a chance to get a glimpse of how much design iteration was taking place and some of the good and bad ideas that led to what we have today. Links to the talk are posted here in Jensen’s...