Raymond Starkey, Director of ACCESSible IT Ltd. , provided us with an example that he has used to teach Access users about using the Partition function to create a frequency distribution. As he says, “no one ever mentions these but they are so powerful they need a mention.” Note:Raymond’s example uses the Northwind sample database that was provided with Access 2000-2003. See below for an example that uses data from the Northwind 2007 database. Example from Northwind 2007 Query Design view: The SQL...

The Power Tips feature of the Access Team Blog has been running for about 3.5 months now, so we thought it’d be a good time to remind everyone how the feature works. What’s a Power Tip? A Power Tip can be a code sample, some SQL, an expression, a series of property settings, or some other Access trick that you have learned along the way, and that you think might be useful to others. They can be old favorites or new discoveries. Who can submit Power Tips? Anyone! Can I see some examples? Sure, click...

Today’s guest contributors are Kerry Westphal, Chris Downs, Krunal Sheth, James Rivera, and Michael Tucker—from the macro designer feature crew. The Macro Designer is a revamped editor that allows you to automate repetitive tasks; wire together forms and reports to create productive UI; and implement business logic in Access databases. We will talk more about business logic next week when we start the conversation about data macros. Probably the best way to introduce this feature is a demo: ";...

There are some great posts written about different investments across the suite of Office client products. Here is a quick guide to the group’s announcement: Access 2010—The 10,000 ft. View (my favorite) Excel 2010—The 10,000 ft. View What’s up with my Inbox in Outlook 2010? Office Web Apps: the Three Tenets Word 2010—Framing the Release What’s New in InfoPath 2010? Business Contact Manager for Microsoft Outlook 2010 Technical Preview Released Introducing PowerPoint 2010 Publisher Technical Beta...

The Office 2010 blog has a great post about send a smile (or some times a frown). Basically, you click on the Send-a-Smile (or frown) to send feedback directly to the team @ Microsoft. These actions can have an immediate impact on the product. Several weeks ago the team was debating changes to BackStage. Some members felt that Save As doesn’t clearly communicate whether you are saving the object or database. All Office apps save the document but Access is different as it has objects within the document...

Last week I wrote about the Office 2010 Technical Preview bevy of announcements. This post kicks off a series of conversations about what is new in Microsoft Access 2010. As a team, our passion is to help people quickly and easily create databases tailored to their needs with tools that are affordable, fast and efficient. Access 2010 is the next iteration in this quest. Here is a peek at some of the many changes you will see: Get started faster . One thing we have learned from the Access 2007 template...

Today’s guest blogger is Alison Balter. Alison is the founder of InfoTech Services Group, Inc. and has authored 14 Access books since 1995. When working in a client/server environment, it is imperative that you limit the number of rows that the user brings over the network wire. It is therefore necessary that you supply a criteria form that allows the user to specify the rows that they want to return. The problem is that the user often designates criteria that is way too broad. In that situation...

Undoubtedly, you have seen a flood of announcements coming from the Office organization today. Some of the highlights include: Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 have reached the technical preview engineering milestone. A limited number of invitation-only participants, including many nominations from the Access blog, can download Access 2010 and the other Office bits from Microsoft Connect . Office Web Applications will be available to nearly half a billion customers...

This is guest post from Allie Rutherford a summer college intern on the Access team. Do you own your own business or are you in a position where you have to keep track of your customer relationships and sales leads? Have you ever wished your CRM or sales software was a little bit different or easier to use? Today, I am posting to ask the users what they expect and desire from Customer Relationship Management software. We are currently doing research into how businesses and small companies track their...

Mike Hnatt has generously extended to the Access blog readers a FREE version of Gladstone’s Access Report Writer . Traditionally, he has sold the developer version of the wizard for $995. The offer includes unlimited computer licenses, ability to change report header and page footers, source code, and royalty-free distribution for your application. One of the best things about the wizard is it is re-entrant. You can learn more about the report wizard here . Here are a few screen shots:    ...