This blog is dedicated to Access related topics. Most of the topics relate to problems I have encountered in the course of database development or questions that people attending my Access training classes may raise from time to time

Welcome to my Access Blog

In this blog, I will be publishing articles from time to time that will be of interest to anyone building and maintaining databases using Microsoft Access. if you are interested in tips and pointers for other products in the Microsoft Office suite, please see my argeeoffice blog here.


Access Developer Tools


FMS Developer Tools are arguably the most comprehensive set of tools for Access, SQL Server, and .NET developers.

This article, John R. Durant's WebLog : Why VBA Still Makes Sense , presents a solid case  for why VBA is the ‘next level’ when it comes to application development in Access and other members of the Office suite. John provides an excellent of VBA since its early days to the present and on into Office 2010 including his perspective on the ‘fit’ between .NET and VBA. John R. Durant's WebLog : Why VBA Still Makes Sense is definitely a worthwhile read.

Ryan McMinn and Clint Covington demonstrate the most significant new Access feature being introduced in the 2010 version View the latest Office Team Blog article and click the link to their video.

to www.officetipsandmethods.com

A little over a year ago I started two blogs, Argee's Office Help BlogMoving and Argee's Access Blog. As the titles suggest, the first focuses on entire Microsoft Office applications except for Microsoft Access. The second is aimed strictly at Microsoft Access related topics. I found a number of free blog hosts and started my first OfficeHelp, a Windows Live Site. After publishing a few articles there, I wanted to be able to separate Access oriented articles from those related to the rest of the Office suite. Windows Live blogs are great for personal/social blogs but I couldn’t find a way to classify or categorize articles with more that a single category/tag for each article.

Visiting a few blogs by my Access colleagues led me to consider the Blogger site which is hosted by Google. I decided to locate my Access site there. Each article can have multiple tags. That makes it easier to specifically classify articles so that a reader can find specific topics more quickly.

Recently, I have come to realize that I really wanted an even more sophisticated classification system than what is possible on the Blogger site. Part of this need stems from the significant change that Microsoft introduced into user interfaces with Office 2010. These changes were particularly significant in Access, my main area of interest. A little Internet searching led me to the WordPress publishing platform.

Will WordPress solve my classification problem? It certainly seems so, and then some. I found that I can set up custom categories and sub-categories. That means that I can flag an article as relating to Access generally, to Access 2007, specifically, and that the article is part of a tutorial. I can also tag each article with one or more tags that will aid in subject oriented searching. Best of all, I found I can include a category search capability in a side bar that is always there at the top of the blog page.

WordPress may not be the last word in meeting my blogging needs but so far I like the look and feel. Now it’s time to get back to writing. For the time being I will mirror articles that I publish at OfficeTipsAndMethods on my OfficeHelp and Access blogs so if you have subscribed to one or both of those feeds you will still be notified of new articles in those blogs. But if you want a “one feed serves all” feed, visit

www.officetipsandmethods.com

and subscribe to the rss feed there.