John Durant from the Office Developer marketing team is blogging about why VBA still makes sense . I expect the Access community is interested in what he has to say. Here is a little taste of the article: Not infrequently I am asked, “So, should I use VBA? Is it going to be around in Office 2010? Is it supported? Should I migrate away from VBA now? Can I count on this technology?” (Here I go with a response!) These are fair questions, because customers need to know that the software systems they...

Today's guest blogger is Michael Merlin, Lead Software Developer at Electronic Communities . I recently wasted an hour trying to set a field's Back Color property to the hex code generated by the color picker. I figured it out after some searching, but still nobody online had the exact correct answer. I wrote a function that lets you easily use the hex color in code. The secret is to swap the R and the B, and then convert the hex to long. Further explanation follows in the comments of the function...

Excel MVP Michael Alexander wanted to share this tip about running an Access parameter query from Excel. He describes the problem thusly: An Access parameter query is a kind of interactive query that prompts you for criteria before the query is run. Parameter queries are useful when you need to ask the query different questions using different criteria each time you run it. Now we all know you can pull data from Access into Excel using MS Query. The problem is that MS Query doesn't let you pull in...

Today’s guest writer is Richard Fennell from Black Marble. Richard is engineering director for Black Marble, hard core .NET developer, and MVP for Team Systems. Black Marble does a lot of custom SharePoint development and sell few accelerator kits. Black Marble is active in the community sponsoring regular .Net developer and SharePoint conferences and workshops. They have worked closely with our team over the last couple months as part of the Office 2010 Technical Adoption Program.  Richard...

Today's guest blogger is Pavlo Pedan of ARGO Business Corp. He has 15 years of experience with Access and has a great site of tips  at http://sites.google.com/site/msaccesscode/ . If you have a form that contains subdatasheets, you can use the following VBA command to expand all of them: Forms![FormName]![SubFormName].Form.SubdatasheetExpanded = True However, we often want only some of the subdatasheets to be expanded, based on some criteria (for example - expand only if subdatasheets contain...

There are a couple big announcements happening today for the Access community. In partnership with Channel 9 we are launching a new show called The Access Show . It will feature Ryan McMinn, myself and others from the team. We will talk in-depth about what is new in Access 2010 and share feedback from the community. Additionally, at the SharePoint Developers Conference we are disclosing more details about Access Services. Access Services is a new SharePoint 2010 feature that allows users to create...

There is a good article by Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley about SharePoint from a Microsoft’s business perspective . Some key points worth highlighting: SharePoint is the fastest growing server product at Microsoft contributing over $1 billion in revenue. There are approximately 40 teams and thousands of people that contribute to the product. The SharePoint conference in Las Vegas next week is sold out with more than 7,000 attendees. Elop talks about SharePoint as a developer platform that integrates...

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. I have been using the ribbon for the last two years and I like it so much, however there was a situation where I wanted to hide the ribbon. I used the Minimize the Ribbon command to hide it, but there was still some space being used by the Office button and the ribbon tabs. After some...

Today's guest blogger is Access MVP Garry Robinson, who offers the Smart Access collection of articles at http://www.vb123.com/kb . A few months ago I purchased the rights to publish the Smart Access magazine online and it is from that collection that I offer this tip from Paul Litwin, the first editor of Smart Access. At the end of that I provide a link to an editorial on Null Values written by the second editor Peter Vogel. It never hurts to get a refresher course on Null values, a necessary evil...

In our never-ending quest to spread the word about Microsoft Access, we now have an official fan page on Facebook! Our news feed includes links to articles on MSDN, TechNet, and Office Online, as well as posts on this blog. You can choose to see our posts in your Facebook news feed automatically, or read them only when you want to. Similarly, if you post something on the fan page, you can choose to be notified whenever someone responds to you. Here’s a quick walkthrough of how the Microsoft Access...