One of the coolest new features in Access 2007 is the ability to gather data through emailed forms. These forms can be used to either update existing data or to gather new data. The forms can either be rich InfoPath forms that show up in-place in Outlook 2007 email messages, or they can be very simple HTML forms that can be completed by users of practically any email client. When the forms are returned to your machine, the data is extracted from the email message (either automatically or manually...

In the last post , I discussed the new AutoFormats in Access 2007. In this post, I'll describe more about how they work and provide a tool that allows you to create your own formats and customize the ribbon gallery of formats. AutoFormat Storage Access 2007 stores AutoFormat information in two different locations, depending on whether those formats have been customized or not. Un-customized formats are stored in tables in an Access 2007 format database that is installed with Office and is shared...

Access 2007 has significantly updated the AutoFormats included in the box, and we'll provide a tool that can help create your own formats or customize the existing ones. This provides a fast way to generate a good (and modern) looking set of formatting across all your applications. Access, along with the other Office applications, has supported AutoFormat for some time, but the formats themselves are looking a little stale. Access 2007 addresses that. In this post, I'll cover the built-in AutoFormats...

This is a quick post on a slick new way to make sure that all of your new databases are set up just as you like. I'm running a little behind on the next regular post as the netcard in the machine I use to build the screenshots expired, so that will be coming after I get my machine patched back together. Database Settings Users often want to have a set of common settings and code for all of their new databases, and this wasn't very easy to do in the past. In Access 12, all you have to do to create...

The last regular post was on Sorting and Grouping in Reports , and that followed a post about Sort & Filter in Forms . This time, we'll go into the new Report View, which provides interactive reports at view time and so improves on the old Print Preview view, which was static. The goal of this feature is to make the report an interactive part of the application in a way you never could before. Report view is simply a new view on reports and a sample report from our Issues tracking app looks like...

This is a quick post to lay out the limits in Access 2007 and make a little clearer how the application works and how it scales. The first table below shows the limits of the database engine itself. Access Database Limits Access database (*.mdb or *.accdb) file size 2 gigabytes, including all objects in the database (data, forms, reports, indices, macros, modules, etc.) Total number of concurrent users 255. Note that the practical limit will likely be lower than this based on database design. Table...