Send-a-smile works

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. People argued that it has always been Save As and it is something we can ship with this time. We also had concerns that Save Database As wasn’t so discoverable. You can do it—but it is in the Share place:

The change was rejected in an effort to reduce unnecessary churn.

Fortunately, a number of people complained about not being able to back up the database or save the database as a different file. Here are some of the comments:

• “Where is the option to Backup a database? used to be an option under  Manage which has gone away.”
• “SAVE AS was hard to find.  I needed Iris to tell me where it was.   I don’t think that should be under “Share” because that is not the main reason you would clone, relocate or rename a database using Save As.  I would only go to Share if I planned to Share It.  Personally, I don’t usually “share” my access databases in any other way than saving to a shared network drive. Just my feedback.  Love everything else.”
• “Yes the file is already in use.  I am trying to save it as a 2007 format database.  I cannot do this unless I open it (since the share button is not available until then) and when I try to save it it complains that it is in use... well of course it is in use... you told me to open it in the first place”
• “It seems I am unable to save the whole database to a different database file like I did in Access 2007.  Has that been removed?”

I’m happy to tell you that in the next beta Save Database As is a top level command:

We can’t act on all feedback but every little bit helps us prioritize the last polishing touches. Thanks for the feedback.