If you've taken a look at some web sites recently, you may have noticed an effect where items (usually images or videos) are brought to the foreground using an effect called a lightbox . The effect is used to dim (or sometimes lighten) the background of the active window while bringing another window to the foreground. The window in the foreground appears to have more prominence because the windows in the background have been dimmed or made transparent. Our friend Tim uses this on his site to display...

One of my favorite tricks with forms in Access has always been what I call a kiosk form. A kiosk form is a form that takes up the entire screen and is one that you might find in a store or shopping center displaying information. For example, a real estate kiosk might display homes for sale in the area. These screens often take up the entire screen so your attention is drawn to the content on the screen. Interesting scenarios for a kiosk form include: Real estate information Dashboards Store directory...

The folks over at My Access Program have posted 21 free video tutorials with topics ranging from data validation to VBA. 11 of the tutorials are Access 2007 specific covering anchoring, alternate row color and data collection via email. Watch the Videos

Peter Mullen is today's guest writer. I don't anticipate this workaround will be required when SP2 is released but we won't know for sure as that work isn't defined at this point. Those who have deployed the runtime RTM version know that you have to remove it before installing the SP1 runtime. This post describes how to chain that action as part of your normal runtime install. Technique Use a chained install to call Msiexec and pass in the product code to uninstall the Access Runtime before you install...

“In the clouds” ~ Using Microsoft Access to query and update Web sites Garry Robinson shows off integrating web 2.0 into Access through REST and VBA. Tip: How to create automatic input masks for Us/Canada Postal Codes Doug Klippert posted a little sample about how to create automatic inputs masks for postal codes

Edit April 9th, 2008: It looks like the fix was checked into a post RTM version of the Package Wizard. It works on internal builds but I now need to figure out the plans for releasing a SP1 version of the Package Wizard. ---- One of the consistent feedback we got on this blog was that people expected to have runtime applications run as trusted applications. We wanted to make this happen for the RTM version of the runtime but some issues kept that from happening. A change was made to the Access 2007...

When you try to open a compiled database file (.accde or .mde) or a compiled project file (.ade) in the original release of Microsoft Office Access 2007, you may receive the following error message: This database is in an unrecognized format. The database may have been created with a later version of Microsoft Office Access than the one you are using. Upgrade your version of Microsoft Office Access to the current one, and then open this database. This error is also described in KB article 946205...

On Friday afternoon we released additional localized versions of the runtime . Enjoy!

I'm thinking about putting together a blog post that shows what the community has done with ribbon extensibility. From my conversations with lots of developers people are still trying to wrap their heads around the new user model It seems that having a few examples might stimulate some ideas. This will also be helpful as we think about the ribbon in Office 14. If you want me to consider your app as one of the featured apps email my spam account a brief description with a few screen shots.

Mike Stowe has a great article and video demo of how to an add-in to a Access 2007 deployment package created from the Package Solution Wizard. He chains the XPS/PDF addin as the example but you can use the technique to install any addin package with your runtime application. On a side note--what do folks think about the video demos the team has been producing? Have they been useful?