LinkedIn offers many opportunities for professionals to interact with each other. There are many groups available for the Microsoft Access, Azure, SQL Server, and Visual Studio .NET communities. Here are some of the vibrant groups we’ve discovered:
Data normalization is fundamental to database design. Properly normalized data makes it easy to support an application over time and simplifies the querying, displaying, and reporting features of an application.
Unfortunately, we don’t always receive or have normalized data. Tables that require adding fields as the data changes over time are particularly problematic and violate the basic premise of database design where adding records is free, but adding fields is expensive:
Here are some updated resources detailing the value of data normalization, including a sample database and VBA code to transpose and normalize your existing data.
The Microsoft Access 2010 version of Total Access Analyzer is close to shipping and we are pleased to offer a FREE preview for you to try it.
Total Access Analyzer is the most popular Microsoft Access add-in and the winner of every Best Microsoft Access Add-in award ever. With Total Access Analyzer, you can truly understand what's going on in your database. Generate comprehensive documentation of all your database objects, get detailed table and field lists, module code printouts, form and report blueprints, and much more. Get detailed cross-references for how objects are linked to each other so you know exactly where each table, query, form, report, macro and module procedure is used. The Application Flow, Data Flow, and Object Flow Diagrams show how code and objects flow across your entire application. Over 300 professional quality and customizable reports are available.
Almost 300 types of issues are uncovered to pinpoint errors, suggest design improvement, and recommend performance tips. Find unused objects, missing field references, unused code and many other things that should be fixed before you deploy your applications. Many of the tips are recommended Best Practices for Access development, so you'll learn how the pros improve their design and development techniques.
We've added many new features to support Access 2010, generate more useful documentation, identify more errors, and suggest more design improvements and best practices. We've also improved the user experience with the ability to open a cross-referenced item in design mode while viewing the information, previewing multiple reports at once, and adding color to all reports. Here is a description of new features.
Take this opportunity to learn what Total Access Analyzer can do for you. See how it documents your databases and identifies errors and opportunities for improving them at the object and code levels. Discover why so many Access users and professionals rely on the program to deliver and create more robust solutions.
The preview version is available for immediate download and is fully functional. It expires on March 15, 2012.
We at FMS have always been passionate about education and have provided a wide range of software solutions for the education community at all levels. Over the past several years, I’ve served on a Business and Community Advisory Board to the Superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools. The public schools in Fairfax County are among the best in the nation with 180,000 students, making it larger than 12 states (by student population). I currently serve as the school board representative on the county’s Information Technology Policy Advisory Committee (ITPAC) to the Board of Supervisors where we review major technology projects for the county.
Tying teacher performance to student achievement
At the beginning of the school year, I was appointed by the superintendent to participate in the county’s Teachers Performance Evaluation Task Force. I’m one of two outsiders on this committee of 35, which includes some of the best teachers, principals and administrators across the county. To meet the waiver requirements of the Federal No Child Left Behind statute, the State of Virginia is requiring teacher performance to be tied to student performance. The state department of education is recommending a 40% weighting. They are not defining on what to base student performance, but state standardized test scores immediately come to mind.
As an outsider who has never been evaluated as a teacher, you can imagine my surprise to discover that while principals were judged by their school’s student performance, student performance is not part of a teacher’s performance evaluation in our county (and probably state). 0%Are you kidding me?
I’ve learned that there’s a lot of angst around this. We all recognize that not all students are equal, and we don’t want to have a system where teachers are evaluated solely on student performance because the incentive would be to only want to teach good students. Good students may perform well in spite of bad teaching, so raw scores are not a good indicator of performance. The fairest testing evaluation system seems to be the concept of “value added” measurements. That is, as a teacher, you’d have students coming in at a certain percentile, and leaving at another percentile at the end of the year. If your students move up, you’ve added value; if they’ve moved down, they would have done better with an average teacher. Sounds good in concept, but this has practical problems such as kids moving in and out of classes within the year, impacts on kids outside teacher control, whether the test is a good measurement, multiple teacher collaborative environments, etc.
That said, 0% is still not acceptable. Nor is scrapping the whole concept based on a few outliers or issues. Especially compared to the current evaluation system where a principal or administrator sits in a classroom for less than an hour each quarter, and huge challenges removing under-performing teachers who don’t improve with training.
What have I learned?
I have been very impressed by individuals on the committee who get it. They understand that it’s in their best interest and that of their profession to set high standards and meet them. Failure to do so not only harms students but undermines political and taxpayer support for public education. Change is coming from the federal level down, and taking a leadership role has long-term benefits.
In our fast-changing software world, we need people to constantly gain new skills and improve their productivity. Performance with old technology last year may not be relevant this year. We can’t rewind each year and evaluate people on skills, client relationships, projects, etc. since so much changes each year. However, in education, the inputs each year are essentially the same (it’d be nice if student performance continually improved but that’s not changing significantly).
In spite of all the shortcomings, there are actually lots of objective measurements available to judge teacher performance. Almost all academic courses have existing pre-tests and post-tests for classes, and of course there are standardized tests. Those opposed to tying teacher performance to student achievement tend to be the ones least interested in providing any measurements for doing so. Propose alternatives if the existing ones are not acceptable. We can’t treat teaching like an art that can’t be measured.
As I pondered the issues around teacher performance, it always boiled down to philosophical issues. What does it mean to be a good teacher? Average class performance? Performance of the best kids? Raising the weakest kid? What if you can’t get a kid to engage and be interested? Whose fault is that? We’ve always known there are great teachers who many people love yet others passionately hate. Who’s best to judge, the students, administrators, peers, parents? Everything has shortcomings.
Who benefits and pays the most for good or bad teaching?
Over the holidays, I started thinking of teaching in a totally new way by considering: Who benefits and pays the most for good or bad teaching?
Well, the students do of course, but no one is eager to have students evaluate teacher performance directly due to the many conflicts of interest.
Parents? They certainly have a stake but being a parent myself and being around other parents, I would hardly consider parents qualified to really know what’s going on with individual classes — they should stay focused on evaluating their own children.
Bureaucrats? Whether at the federal, state, or county level, I think they’re hard pressed to come up with specifics for evaluating a particular teacher. They can design what should be taught and offer resources and training, but evaluations taking into account each school and class’s unique situation is too detailed to do with broad requirements.
An alternative paradigm: ‘Teachers are the Customer’
I’ve now come up with a whole new way to look at teaching. Essentially, a teacher receives kids from upstream, trains them, and then passes them off to their next downstream teacher. Looking at it more like a production line, the teacher is a huge beneficiary and victim of good and bad teaching, more than anyone else in the system other than the student. Teachers should be empowered to define expectations and evaluate their upstream teachers for their performance. Done properly, this creates a positive feedback loop and automatically addresses any unique issues within a school. After all, doesn’t every teacher want to grow and deliver the best batch of students to their colleagues? Looking at it from this perspective, the teachers I discussed this with all knew exactly which teachers upstream from them they thought were good or bad overall and for different types of student personalities. In fact, several said there were teachers they would want or avoid sending their kids to. Wow, wouldn’t it be great to include the input of downstream teachers in a teacher’s evaluation? Isn’t that an important person each teacher is serving? I felt I made a mental breakthrough.
Feedback from the administrators
So I introduced this to the Teacher Performance Task Force last week. And while they appreciated my new perspective, I didn’t receive an immediate endorsement. They raised some issues such as teachers were not trained to do this, and how new teachers could properly evaluate more experienced teachers. I took their feedback under consideration.
At last night’s meeting, I mentioned my idea to the superintendent. He liked my approach and asked how it was received within the task force. It then occurred to me that the feedback there was not acceptable. The concept that more junior downstream teachers would evaluate more senior upstream teachers may be too foreign and frightening for some to accept, but that’s a resource which should be utilized. Training to do it properly is just training. You have to serve your customer. I’m not saying a teacher’s entire performance is based on that or that experience isn’t a factor (it is), but the next teacher plays a unique and important role in evaluating performance.
What’s next?
Overall, I appreciate the committee welcoming and encouraging my feedback and treating me as an equal, given my never having been a teacher. We all share a goal of improving public K-12 education with a fair teacher evaluation system, and I recognize I’m naive about these actual evaluation processes. They’ve asked for my out-of-the box thinking and applying best practices from outside the education community. That’s how I reached my teacher focused paradigm. Teachers have the most at stake with creating an evaluation system that at the very least, identifies and removes poor performers that training fails to improve. Teachers are very concerned with the new evaluation system, so empowering them in the process should be positively received. In the end, teachers pay the highest price if improvement doesn’t occur. First in their day-to-day classroom efforts dealing with under-prepared students, and longer term their professional reputation and taxpayer support. Removing under-performing teachers, doesn’t even reduce headcount. It gives an opportunity to someone who is eager to teach in the school system and has above average promise (if not, that’s a recruiting problem). Beyond that, the evaluation system should focus on professional development to help teachers identify areas of improvement. There will probably be a different process for evaluating rookie teachers who are expected to gain skills initially versus more experienced teachers who should already have those skills and falling back to “rookie” level would not be considered acceptable.
We have a few more meetings before the task force needs to finish and make its recommendations. They are hoping to put the new system in place for next school year. Wish me luck.
We are very pleased to announce that Total Access Detective for Microsoft Access 2010 is now shipping with support for the 32 and 64 bit versions of Access 2010.
Ever wonder what changed between your database versions or the difference between two similar objects or tables? Total Access Detective is the premier program to detect differences between Microsoft Access databases, objects, code, and data.
Available as a Microsoft Access add-in, Total Access Detective lets you easily find differences between objects in your currently opened database. Easily find changes in your table and field definitions, object properties, controls, report sections, embedded macros, regular macros, modules, and data. The results are available to you in reports and on screen which can be copied or exported.
You can also compare any two databases to easily find exactly how they changed. Your databases can be an ACCDB, MDB or ADP database format. The new version lets you create separate databases for each comparison so you can easily manage multiple databases and changes over time.
We've added many new features to make Total Access Detective more powerful than ever:
Supports Microsoft Access 2010, 32 and 64-bit versions
Compares All Database Types Supported by Access 2010
Compares the new Microsoft Access 2010 enhancements including new object properties, macro syntax, and VBA commands
Performs Line-by-Line Comparisons of Embedded Macros
Procedures that Did Not Change are Listed
New Data Comparison Option to Ignore Case Differences
When Comparing Modules, Optionally Ignore Blank Lines and Comments (also applies to text block comparisons)
Exclude Properties from Comparison
Create and Manage Multiple Database Comparison Results. You are no longer limited to one set of comparison results!
Command Line Launching of Total Access Detective Can Now Specify Storage Database Name
Improved User Interface with Office/Access 2010 Theme Support
New Reports and Improved Selection Screen
New User Manual and Context Sensitive Help
Manually comparing databases for design and data differences is prone to error. Discover why so many Microsoft Access professionals rely on Total Access Detective to improve their productivity by quickly identifying the changes in their work.
Total Access Components 2010 Ships with 32 and 64 bit ActiveX Controls
Create dazzling forms with Total Access Components, the only collection of custom controls designed specifically for Microsoft Access.
With little or no code, add advanced menus, rotated text, bitmap animation, resizer and splitter bars, progress meters, gauges, dials, sliders, spin buttons, pop-up notes, Windows dialogs, clocks, fancy buttons, borders, rotated tabs, cursors, etc. A sample database includes examples of every control and how to customize them.
The 2010 version is rebuilt using C++ version 10 and supports both 32 and 64 bit platforms without having to make any changes to your forms or code.
Total Access Components 2010 supports Access 2000 through 2010. It includes a royalty-free distribution license and a deployment program to easily distribute it to your users. See all the new features and download the free trial version.
There are PDF reports of the error codes and descriptions, and a database containing a with each error code and its different descriptions access MSAccess versions 2010, 2007, 2003, 2002, and 2000.
Here’s the detailed HTML page that lists every Microsoft Access 2010 error code with its description and for some of them, hyperlinks to resources that address the error and/or provide more information on the topic. Since this page is so large, please be patient while it loads.
This resources is part of our Microsoft Access Developer Help Center where you’ll find lots of other information to improve your skills. Hope this helps!
I’ve recently had several discussions with developers (not technology specific) about how they can be perceived as higher level professionals in enterprise environments.
One of the key steps is making sure you understand the larger needs of the organization. While it’s nice to create solutions quickly and on your own, IT managers look beyond the current solution or technology to see how it will be supported and enhanced over time. Developers who create solutions that do not follow industry or organizational standards are a risk. While it may be personally satisfying to do things on your own, that’s not a perspective shared or encouraged by organizations worried about what happens when you’re no longer available to help. After all, they can all of a sudden become responsible for your work and the next person may not be so pleased with your “creativity”.
It’s important to mitigate that risk by reaching out and using resources to help you be more productive. Adopt processes that address the long term requirements of a solution to support its entire life cycle. This begins with understanding best practices for creating solutions and avoiding common mistakes. Within the application, there should be consistent coding, error handling and commenting standards, the use of source code libraries or shared code across applications, etc. It should also include system documentation, version control, disaster recovery plans, quality assurance and test plans, deployment processes, etc. Issues of security, reliability, scalability, and maintainability become more and more important as your solution becomes more successful.
We at FMS face these issues all the time, which directly resulted in the creation of many of our commercial products. Professional developers in enterprises use lots of 3rd party tools to be more productive. Take advantage of what we have to offer so your organization addresses these critical needs at a fraction of the cost of you building it yourself. In fact, using industry products and standards makes you more of a professional, not less.
Here are some resources that can help Microsoft Access developers get to the next level:
Enterprise organizations understand the investment that’s necessary to support their solutions and professionals because the work is so valuable and mistakes so expensive. For your personal growth, it’s important to spend time learning on your own whether it’s through online resources or books. Learning from others is the next level which can be in person and through online groups. Formal training can also help. Hiring consultants for their specific expertise can be quite useful in bringing in new ideas and solutions, and teaching you additional skills and best practices. Finally, products that can leverage your knowledge and skills, or automate manual steps, have a tremendous return on investment both short-term and long-term. Take advantage of all these resources for your own sake and because other professional are.
Geoff Hollander of Northwest Database Services and the Portland Access User Group wrote a review of our Total Access Analyzer product. He provides a nice discussion of how it finds ways to improve his Access applications:
“I always thought that I was thorough about going through an application and cleaning up loose ends, but Total Access Analyzer proved: I was wrong and I probably won’t call another application complete until Total Access Analyzer gives it the OK.”
He also suggests how the documentation it generates and its reports are a business opportunity:
“Selling a documentation package generated by Total Access Analyzer for your application is a great way to add a training-free, trouble-free and reasonably priced profit center to the work you are already performing!….Total Access Analyzer is a solid product that any Access developer should have in their toolbox; and one that will pay for itself in short order.”
Ever wonder what changed between your database versions or the difference between two similar objects or tables? Total Access Detective is the premier program to detect differences between Microsoft Access databases, objects, code, and data.
Available as a Microsoft Access add-in, Total Access Detective lets you easily find differences between objects in your currently opened database. Easily find changes in your table and field definitions, object properties, controls, report sections, embedded macros, regular macros, modules, and data. The results are available to you in reports and on screen which can be copied or exported.
You can also compare any two databases to easily find exactly how they changed. Your databases can be an ACCDB, MDB or ADP database format. The new version lets you create separate databases for each comparison so you can easily manage multiple databases and changes over time.
We’ve added many new features to make Total Access Detective more powerful than ever.
Manually comparing databases for design and data differences is prone to error. Discover why so many Microsoft Access professionals rely on Total Access Detective to improve their productivity by quickly identifying the changes in their work.