You can find modScaleForm here on SourceForge.  It is an open source utility for scaling Access forms to fit different display resolutions.  As we've seen in a prior post, anchoring provides this kind of support in 2007 automatically.  If you're using 2003 or previous, this might be pretty helpful though. Thanks Markus for the pointer!

We just released a polished video geared towards explaining the why someone should use Access. Here is the introduction: Tired of juggling your business contact data among an address book, lists of orders, file folders, and ledgers? An Access database can bring it all together for you. The result is consistency, greater accuracy, and exciting options for using your data. Starting with an Access database, you can create tables, queries, forms, and reports that enable you to present and analyze your...

As you know, the Access Getting Started experience went through some dramatic changes in 2007. This redesign has contributed significantly to the uptake on templates. What most people don't know is the screen also has dynamic content that is updated regularly from the team. The articles listed in the spotlight control and the featured templates will change if you enable "Automatic update of content from Office Online." To enable automatic updates simply click on the orange bar at the bottom...

There is a new video demo that shows off the new data collection feature. This one is a more formal and polished than the other demos. Enjoy!

Chris Downs from the Access user assistance team has just finished a nice video demo about making controls grow and shrink as the form is resized.

I ran across this new Silverlight version of the Microsoft download center this morning.  If you haven't seen Silverlight yet, it is pretty cool stuff. It is Microsoft's engine for doing rich graphics composition in the web.  Here are all the downloads Microsoft has in the download center which are Access related.

Recently, I was asked the following question: All of my Access work has always been my sole responsibility and I have been accustomed to making all the design and development decisions, and doing all the work myself. I am now attempting to work on a project with someone else. The person managing the project doesn't have a firm grasp on software or database design principles. The project is potentially good for me as it will provide an opportunity to learn about SharePoint and Access 2007. Today came...

A few readers have recently expressed concern and anxiety about an article published by The Register . Particularly, “VBA will disappear completely when Office 2007 for Windows is replaced, sometime around 2009.” As someone who is working everyday on Office 14, I can assure you that VBA is not disappearing in the next release of Office. VBA will continue to be a valuable option for developers to customize Office solutions to meet their business requirements. I can’t talk more about Office 14 but...

The Office Online writers for Access have recently produced four cool video demos about designing reports. The effort should help the topic Modify a report become much easier for people to understand.

The other day I was working on a report where I wanted to build a sentence that included multiple fields from a record but I wanted to use rich text formatting to provide contrast . My scenario was pretty simple in that I wanted a bold title with a date trailing it. Some think like: This was a great book , reviewed on 1/12/2007 My problem was both fields were pulled from normal text fields and I wanted the data to trail immediately after the variable length title. Here is how I made it work inside...