Access 2007 vs 2003

There are some things we can't do anymore in Access 2007. I'll put here some of them and the workarounds that I'm aware of:

1. Joining a workgroup.
Since Access 2007 doesn't support user-level security in the new accdb format, there seems to be no way to join a workgroup anymore, not from the ribbon. Just open the VBA editor and run this command (in the Immediate window is the easiest):
Docmd.RunCommand acCmdWorkgroupAdministrator

2.

to remember your paths

I found a nifty little tool that helps me so much every day that I have to share.

It's free and totally great.

Here's the scoop:

If you are a power user or even a medium user, you tend to go to the same folders over and over again. You might end up with a bunch of shortcuts on the desktop, you might even have custom shortcut bars on your taskbar, but that might not be enough.

This little tool remembers the folders you've been using recently and whenever you need to open or save a file, a tiny toolbar is getting attached on top of your open/save dialog. This allows you to quickly select a folder you've used before or a folder currently open on your computer.

It's incredible how useful this is in its simplicity.

I find myself over and over looking for it when I'm working on other computers. I wish microsoft would integrate such a tool in their windows explorer.

It's called FlashFolder and you can download it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/flashfolder/

Enjoy!

testing on Virtual Machines

Once you have the application, or even during the development phase, it's good to test if that application works in verious conditions. 

Windows XP/Vista, 32 bit or 64 bit, with or without Office installed, with Office 2k, XP, 2k3, 2k7, there are a lot o possible environment conditions that can affect the performance of your application.

Let's say you're working with Access 2007 and you use a font like Cambria which looks good on your computer. You'll be surprised to see that on a computer with only Access 2007 Runtime installed, this font might not be available so your interface will look different.

You can only see that if you test the application in a controled environment

Ideally you'd have access to a bunch of computers, each of them with a certain configuration but most of the time that's not the case.

And it's actually not necessary. All you need is a bunch of Virtual Machines. Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 is free and it's an invaluable tool from this point of view. I've work with it extensively and, although it does require some serious resources, it works great.

My favourite setup is to have a second computer running these virtual machines while I work in source on my development machine.

But of course you can have these virtual machines running on your development PC which makes it easy to drag&drop files there but it does take some resources. If you have this setup, which I used a lot, a second monitor comes in very handy.

Please remember that you do need OS licenses even for the virtual machines, which is probably why MS Virtual PC is free.

Also in certain cases, like testing installation packages over and over on a clean machine, the Undo Disk feature of Virtual PC will come in very handy.

MS Virtual PC is available for download here.

Enjoy! 

VBA code management tool

One of the most useful set of tools I found for VBA code editing is the MZ Tools. 

If you write a lot of VBA code, you'll really like it. It's free and it has an unbelievable set of features.

My favourite is the Find tool that returns all the occurences of the sought string in a very intuitive tree-style list. This made my code changes so much easier.

You can add line numbers, add error handling and code comments, find all callers of a specific procedure, create a list of favorite procedures, use up to 10 private clipboards to copy/paste various code and a lot more.

You can find it at http://www.mztools.com.

I hope it's helpful to you.

Cheers!