Category Archives: Microsoft Access Products

Jan 04

Total Access Admin for Microsoft Access 2010 is Shipping

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Total Access Admin lets you monitor your Microsoft Access databases to see who’s currently in it. It’s ideal for understanding who’s currently connected, compacting databases after everyone has exited it, and troubleshooting multi-user problems.

The Total Access Admin 2010 supports Microosft Access 2010 and 2007. In addition to supporting Access 2010, it now lets you monitor multiple databases in one screen. You can perform actions across all the databases, watch the activity in real time, log the users entering and exiting each database, and compact the database after everyone exits. Visit the New Features page for all the enhancements.

Total Access Admin 2003, version 11.5, is also released for Access 2003 and earlier.

Free Trial versions of both versions are available.

Dec 03

Free Microsoft Access Small Business Solutions Book Offer

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Free Microsoft Access Small Business Solutions BookGet a FREE copy of the Microsoft Access Small Business Solutions book by Teresa Henning, Truitt Bradly, Larry Linson, Leigh Purvis, Brent Spaulding with the foreword written by FMS president Luke Chung (a $50 value)

Thanks to a special arrangement with Theresa Henning and the publisher we are pleased to offer a limited quantity of this book for free to purchasers of any of our product suites. This book contains descriptions and code for a wide range of challenges small business and workgroups face.

*NOTE* Thank you for your interest. This offer is no longer available.

Aug 20

Deploying Microsoft Access Databases Linked to SQL Azure Databases

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SQL Azure A few weeks ago, I discussed how Microsoft Access could link to databases hosted on SQL Azure. Here’s a new paper discussing How to Deploy Microsoft Access Databases Linked to a SQL Azure Database. Details on how this works and how to distribute your databases are covered. The people who receive your database don’t need a license of SQL Server but do need to have its ODBC driver installed on their machines.

Here’s the original blog on Microsoft Access and Cloud Computing with SQL Azure Databases.

Aug 19

Speed Up Microsoft Access and Visual SourceSafe Integration

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Microsoft Visual SourceSafeMicrosoft AccessUsing Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS) with Microsoft Access for system development is great for tracking old versions, maintaining a professional Access development platform, and multi-developer environments. Being able to quickly see old versions of individual objects, differences over time, and check-in and check-out objects to prevent multiple developers from changing the same object are all wonderful features. Visual Source Safe is part of MSDN. By installing the Office/Access developer extensions/edition or Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), VSS gets added to your Access menus.

Unfortunately, as Access databases get more objects, VSS slows down and can sometimes take minutes to add a new object to the database. Waiting for VSS to prompt you for every new object not only wastes time (especially if you don't want to add a temporary object to VSS), it disrupts the rhythm of system development. Fortunately, there's an easy way to work around this. Read this paper Speed Up Microsoft Access and Visual SourceSafe Integration for details, including Access 2010.

Jul 23

Microsoft Access and Cloud Computing with SQL Azure Databases

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Microsoft AccessSQL AzureWe at FMS are very excited about cloud computing and started developing solutions using Microsoft Azure including SQL Azure well before it was released to the general public. We feel cloud computing represents the next big platform change in the software industry and the most significant transformation since the introduction of the Internet in the mid-1990’s. It will transform the internal hardware, application hosting, and data storage business the same way electric companies eliminated most organization’s need to generate their own electricity.

While there’s been lots of discussions of Azure with .NET and SQL Server, we also see lots of opportunities with Azure and the Microsoft Access/Excel/Office community. In fact, we’re busily working on a way to integrate Access data and files with the cloud. Meanwhile, we’d like to share some tips and techniques for linking Access databases directly to tables in SQL Azure. This opens up huge new opportunities to create and deploy Access databases using a more robust, cheaper, and highly scalable platform that is enterprise quality.

I look forward to your feedback on two new papers:

Jul 16

Guest Speaker on Radio Show: Start Up or Shut Up

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On Monday July 19, 2010, I’ll be live on the local radio show Start up or Shut up! which covers creating and running a small business.  It’ll be from 2-3PM on 1580 AM in Northern Virginia.

Start up or Shut up! is a LIVE radio show Monday afternoon from 2-3pm on the Big Talker 1580 AM hosted by Mark Bucher & Tom Gregg.

Jun 24

Microsoft Access Tip: Problems Converting a Database in Access 2007 from ACCDB to MDB

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From Access 2007, you may want to convert an Access ACCDB database to a legacy MDB format. You may have done it several times before but all of a sudden, you get this message:

 

It turns out this occurs if the database was opened with Microsoft Access 2010.

Learn more about the issue and workaround on our web page, Error in Microsoft Access 2007 when saving an ACCDB Database as MDB Format.

May 11

Streamlining Communications with Your Contacts

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Microsoft Access Email BlasterTotal Access EmailerMicrosoft Access Email

We have a long history of leveraging existing data to improve decision-making and communications.

Many of you are already familiar with how our Total Access Emailer program automates the sending of personalized emails with recipient specific data and reports. This amazing product lets you leverage the power of your data to significantly improve how you communicate with your contacts.

With our experience creating Total Access Emailer, our Professional Solutions Group has helped many organizations incorporate the product and implement advanced, custom features.

We’ve also taken this technology to the next level by creating web sites to host files rather than emailing them to your contacts. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can extend your Windows desktop files to the web, please let us know. We can make it easy for your contacts to privately log in and see their files.

Can we help you with a project? Contact us for a Risk Free Assessment.

May 11

Avoid Using DoEvents to Wait in Microsoft Access, VBA, and VB6

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In our Microsoft Access, VBA, and VB6 programs, we often need to pause processing for a certain period of time, or until a specific time, and then continue processing. One common way to do this is to use the DoEvents function in a loop while waiting, however, this method consumes the CPU time and slows down the PC considerably. This is a significant problem when pausing for more than a couple of seconds, when users will notice the slow down. Use the Sleep command instead.

This is available in our Total Visual SourceBook!

May 11

Adding (and Subtracting) Weekdays in Microsoft Access, VBA, and VB6

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Microsoft Access, VBA, and VB6 include a wide range of built-in Date functions, including DateAdd, which calculates the difference between two dates. A common need, however, is to add a number of weekdays to a date, without counting weekend dates.

Learn about this and all our royalty-free module code in Total Visual SourceBook where you can also perform business day math with a list of holidays to avoid.