The Office 2007 public beta is availabe on the office site from this link: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx . For those that do download and check things out, please let us know what you think.

In an earlier post, I showed the Navigation Pane , which shows all of the objects in the current database. The Nav Pane works great, is easy to expand and collapse sections, and so on, but the list can still get long enough to be hard to find things quickly. So, we've added the ability to filter it. Here's how it works. First, the filtering UI is turned off by default (since it takes up space and is only useful for some large databases). If you'd like to use it, go to the Navigation Options dialog...

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...

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...