Today’s guest writers are Steve Greenberg and Viki Selca. The PMs that have lead the effort to make it easier to create great looking apps. People say “Don’t judge a book by its cover” but everyone who develops software knows that applications are judged by their look and feel every day, and for good reason. It’s critical to keep the user interface clean so that end users of the application can get their work done without fuss. If you depend on Access as a key part of...

This is the next installment in a series of posts about Access 2007 originally made by one of our developers on the Access team on his own blog that I'm moving here for the broader audience to enjoy. "I find color schemes that I just like and that just feel right" - Alan Bean Figure 1: Access 2007 Color Picker In Access 2007, we have changed the color picker control from that old 80s looking control to a 21st century color picker. This new color picker is now consistent across all of Access, and...

The new template work we did in 2007 is awesome, but I know it is not obvious how you can customize the template experience. There was at least one question in the newsgroups about this already, so I thought I would offer this up here as well. Template files in Access 2007 are a totally new file format based on the Open Packaging Convention which is also used by Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for the .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx extensions, respectively. Access's old template files used to be .mdb files...

Today's guest writer is Mike Sullivan - a tester on the Access team With the release of Visual Studio Team System 2008 , we've recently received questions from several customers regarding whether or not Team Foundation Server (TFS) can act as a source code control provider for the Access source code control (SCC) component. The answer is yes! Although many folks refer to Access’ source code control component as “SourceSafe integration,” that only tells part of the story. SCC integration...

Building modern looking data forms & reports in Access 2003 can be difficult. Doing the heavy lifting is easy - there are great tools for building the data-bound portions of the form - but making the interface look great can be a challenge and can require some creative hacks. UtterAccess even has a popular board devoted to helping people build better looking interfaces. In Access 12, we've built a number of features that will help people build great looking apps with far less code, time and effort...

Highlights The ability to export reports to Excel has been added. Fixes for issues with the import data wizards, report printing and previewing, macros, Excel integration, and date filters. Updates to Access Developer Extensions and Access Runtime are updated for SP2 and are available in all supported languages. The ADE is patched with the full Office Suite patch, while the Access Runtime is in a separate patch. More Access Runtime info This version of the Access 2007 Runtime contains the same version...

I know lots of you are very anxious to get your hands on this build. You can go download the SP1 runtime. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D9AE78D9-9DC6-4B38-9FA6-2C745A175AED&displaylang=en This version of the Access 2007 Runtime contains files whose versions are slightly higher than the level of the same files that are updated by Office 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1). For additional information about Office 2007 Service Pack 1 and the Access 2007 issues fixed by Office 2007...

Today's guest blogger is Luke Chung, President and Founder of FMS, Inc. Luke has written and presented a wide range of topics related to Access over the years. In addition to their many Access related products, FMS offers a wealth of great Access papers , tips , and video on their site. In Microsoft Access tables, the AutoNumber field type allows you to assign a unique sequential number to each row in a table. AutoNumber fields are often used as the Primary Key, since they are unique and permanent...

Say you need a combo box that is always populated with the last day of the current month, as well as the last days next five months. For example, in May, you want it to look like this: Then, in June, you want the choices to automatically roll over so that the first date is 6/30/2009, and the last one is 11/30/2009. How do you do this without manually updating the combo box’s data source? Try a callback function. A callback function lets you use VBA code to fill the list with the appropriate values...

We have an internal Access Discussion alias that is used for by MS employees to get answers to their questions. Recently I saw a good question about how to refresh SharePoint lists. Here is the problem… SharePoint lists that are linked to Access 2007 database files will not reflect structural changes to the lists in SharePoint.  Once someone changes list schema, you can continue to use the linked lists in Access for read-only purposes without even knowing that the list structure has changed...