Here's a question that comes up from time to time. The other day, someone internally asked about the difference between using a dot "." vs. a bang "!" for control references in a form in VBA. In other words, given a form - Form1, with a control - Control1, what are the differences between: Form1.Control1    ' Control reference using a dot - and - Form1!Control1    ' Control reference using a bang Michael Kaplan was kind enough to respond with the...

People seem to really like the Access 2007 demos we have been doing. The team has recently published three more on Office Online: Watch this: Add or remove controls from a layout Watch this: Create a form that contains a subdatasheet Watch this: Create a subform by dragging one form onto another form Enjoy!

KB article 950812 provide more information about a scenario where some people have reported that a compact and repair deletes their database. You can’t download the fix directly but can get it by calling CSS . This fix will be included in SP2 when that ships (I don’t have an ETA). Here is the most relevant part of the article: In Office Access 2007, when you try to compact an .accdb database, you may receive the following error message: Microsoft Office Access can't delete database name .accdb after...

FYI - There is a good panel and talk at TechEd 2008 about Access and SQL Server. TechEd Online Panel _05: Are we there yet? Successfully navigating the bumpy road from Access to SQL Server - 6/3/2008 1:00PM-2:00PM Come get your SQL server migration questions answered by real-world experts Armen Stein (J Street Technology), Luke Chung (FMS), Stephen Forte (Telerik), and Paul Sheriff (PDSA). Learn from their experiences over many years in helping their customers migrate from Access/Jet to SQL Server...

There is a new article with video about the new anchoring functionality in Access 2007. Enjoy!

Every now and again we get the question of "what is the difference between encryption and encoding?" This came up again today so we wanted to try to answer it more broadly. In short, the feature that we call " encryption " is a feature that was introduced for ACCDB files in Access 2007. This feature was an improvement over the feature known as "encoding" in Access 2003. "Encoding" uses a proprietary algorithm for scrambling the data in a database and was first...

Today's guest writer is Mike Sullivan - a tester on the Access team With the release of Visual Studio Team System 2008 , we've recently received questions from several customers regarding whether or not Team Foundation Server (TFS) can act as a source code control provider for the Access source code control (SCC) component.  The answer is yes! Although many folks refer to Access’ source code control component as “SourceSafe integration,” that only tells part of the story. ...

Renaud posted some comments to the previous post about transparency forms and made some really cool enhancements to the code, along with a note about using a class module to make it easier to use. This is how I use transparency forms in my own implementations so let's update the post to show how you can do this with a class. I've incorporated Renaud's changes to the API code which adds the following functionality: Disable transparency when Access is running under Remote Desktop Cover the entire screen...