I’m pleased to announce the Access team is taking nominations to participate in the Office 2010 Technical Beta program. We expect availability of our first beta release, known as Technical Preview, in the month of July. The team is excited to get feedback from our community that will help us make this a great release. Here is your opportunity to nominate yourself to participate in the program (space is limited). If you are interested in beta testing Access 14 please complete the following nomination...

Today’s guest blogger is Joel Graff. Joel is a field engineer with the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) . He’s sharing how he utilized Access to prove the efficiency of their drivers and equipment in managing winter road conditions. This last year salt prices skyrocketed on us (increasing threefold in some cases). As a result, upper management in IDOT insisted on using more "salt conservative" spreading policies when we apply salt to our roads during snowstorms. New policies...

Mike Hnatt at Gladstone Solutions has a nifty Report Writer utility, available at http://gladstonesolutions.com/default.aspx . The utility lets you create reports and mailing labels quickly and easily, just by stepping through a few wizard-like screens. What’s more, Mike is offering a 25% discount through August 31, 2009 for blog readers. When ordering, just type Access Team Blog in the Please tell us how you found out about us box on the order form.

Recently, there was a thread on UtterAccess that I thought might be helpful to more people. The poster radish asks: I'd like to change the color of a control then be able to change it back to its original color. If I wanted to use the theme's highlight color, e.g., how would I do that in code? It's listed in the property sheet as "Highlight". Sure, I could grab the values of that color but is it possible to reference "Highlight", "Access Theme 5" or "Dark Blue 3"...

Recently I was asked the following question: I am looking to get an understanding of the internal operations during an Access 2007 synchronize execution. I have just been exposed to a SharePoint MOSS and Access 2007 environment where at times the normal sync time goes from 7-minutes to around an hour. I am taking the side of “network bandwidth” as the reason and not the side of “data quantity” as the root cause for the increased time. Each user has their own copy of the SharePoint Lists (tables)...

As a young teenager I use to show goats at the Utah County and Utah State fairs. My parents would park our family trailer at the fair grounds and let my brother and me spend the week taking caring for the animals and hanging around the fairgrounds—it was almost like living on our own. I fondly remember one year the excitement of taking home $56 in prize winnings and several best of show ribbons. I’m pretty sure running fairs in the 80’s involved lots of paper and few computers to make the job easier...

Today’s guest blogger is Edwin Blancovitch. Edwin is president of Advanced Developers.net , creators of Easy Payroll , a software package to manage your human resources, payroll, scheduling, time and attendance needs. When you're designing a form or report, you may want to provide a method for a user to easily use a command that applies only to the correct context. One way to do this is to create a custom shortcut menu and apply it to a form report, or control. The shortcut menu appears when the...

I grew up on a farm and have a soft spot in my heart for people that work with animals. I recently came across great looking apps for managing horses and cattle. People that raise animals know that good record keeping is fundamental to a successful operation. Here are a couple quotes Terrell Miller sent me about their business: We put a lot of time into the interface as we've seen it really help sell the software for us.  Many of our customers are in the 50+ age range and are often intimidated...

Wayne Phillips from EverythingAccess recently sent us mail announcing a special for our blog readers: The product, SimplyVBA Global Error Handler , offers a revolutionary way of catching VBA errors on a global scale throughout your project without having to make any changes to your existing code. Once initialized, the product routes all errors that occur in your project to your defined VBA subroutine where you can then determine how to handle the error (e.g. continue on to a local handler, ignore...

Say you need a combo box that is always populated with the last day of the current month, as well as the last days next five months. For example, in May, you want it to look like this: Then, in June, you want the choices to automatically roll over so that the first date is 6/30/2009, and the last one is 11/30/2009. How do you do this without manually updating the combo box’s data source? Try a callback function. A callback function lets you use VBA code to fill the list with the appropriate values...