Power Tip: Pin Access applications to the Windows 7 taskbar

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 like to be innovative and use new features from programs. Recently I updated my apps to Office 2010; the process was very easy. However, at the same time I also updated my developer machine to Windows 7 and I saw something very unusual/new for me: there was no Quick Launch. Instead, now you pin applications to the taskbar or to the Start menu. Originally I thought it was going to be easy, but then I realized that Access applications cannot be pinned to the Start menu or to the taskbar because they are not executable. OK, here we have a challenge. I could just forget about the nice functionality of the Quick Launch, but I like to use it because it allows you to start any app without looking for the shortcut on the desktop or in the Start menu.

Here is the problem:

• When you right click the icon of your Access application, the option to pin is not available.
• When you drag your Access app to the taskbar, and you want to pin, the app does not get pinned.

Initially I thought, I will just forget about this. But then I remembered from old installations I used to do with Office 97 and Office 2000, that the way to start the applications was different, and I started to look for alternatives.

The trick is to edit the shortcut so it loads Access first, and then it loads your app. Here’s how to do it:

1. Right-click the shortcut and then click Properties.
2. In the Target property, add the full path to MSACCESS.EXE before the file name. In my case, Windows is 64-bit, so Office gets installed in the "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\MSACCESS.EXE" path, so the Target property ends up looking like this:
   
   "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\MSACCESS.EXE" C:\Payroll\Payroll.accdr
   
   Note that the double-quotes are needed because there are spaces in the path to MSACCESS.EXE. If there are spaces in the path to your application, you will need to enclose that path in double-quotes as well, for example:
   
   "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\MSACCESS.EXE" "C:\Payroll Files\Payroll.accdr"
   
   Just make sure you include a space between the first path and the second path.
3. Click OK in the Properties dialog box.

If you your application uses the .accdb or .accde file extension, you should now have a shortcut that you can pin to the taskbar. Right-click your shortcut, and now the Pin to Taskbar/Pin to Start Menu options are available. However, you might have noticed that I use the .accdr extension, because I use the Access runtime for my apps.  Because of this, Access gives me a warning and closes the application:

·

To solve this problem for the .accdr extension, we need to take one extra step in the icon creation--add the runtime switch to the command line as shown here:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\MSACCESS.EXE" C:\Payroll\Payroll.accdr /runtime

Again, make sure to add the space between the path and the /runtime switch. No double-quotes are needed for the switch.

There you have it!

Edwin

Be a guest blogger! Send your Power Tips to accpower@microsoft.com.