Millions of blog hits and template downloads

Are you surprised, I am not? At last someone inside Microsoft has understood what the duo MS Access and JET is. I hope you manage to get the message thru to the management of Microsoft as well. When Steve Ballmer was in Stockholm two weeks ago he spoke very convincing about the commitment to IW and BI. Maybe some up there also has understood that it is much easier to earn money from loyal customers than it will ever be looking for prospects to get new ones.

Hopefully this will give the developers around Office the funds they need to develop the tools used by the IW community.

That sounds like much, but I think Access in fact deserves a lot more.

Since the blog gets updated daily I have entered it often in the past month. I assume many others did so as well. So I think if you want to find out how many people actually read the blog you have to take multiple entrances of the same people into account. Somewhere else in the blog Zac mentioned that “Access is installed and used by >100M users around the world at least once a month”. Again, I think this figure needs some clarification. There is a very big difference between “installed” and “used”. Does this number include all the times Office is installed? In that case could it be that most of these users don’t even know that they have also installed Access, not to mention know how to use it? And also, if you have some way of counting the number of times Access has been opened and “used” on a user’s machine, by having the program send Microsoft a message of some sort, then perhaps this count includes people opening Access several times a day. I am not saying that Access is not popular, but I think it can be so much more so, if it was easier to deploy and maintain.

...and if all these millions install service pack 3 of Office 2003, let's hope they don't experience the strange errors that my client has experienced. Datasheet check boxes not working correctly, just being one of them.

Congratulations on the popularity of your site. I can't speak for the millions of others, but I keep checking this blog to see if you've finally released updates which will make Access finally trustworthy. It's simply not reliable in its present form. The web is littered with horror stories.

Unfortunately, there is a big bug in Access2007 Runtime that I have not been able to work around. During installation of runtime, several critical dll's are missing, which allow the exporting of reports to rtf/txt/html etc. I have not been able to find the dll's online which means there is great limitation to the ability of the database to email reports. Just out of curiousity, does anyone KNOW where I can get these dll's as standalone downloads?