Argee's Access Blog

I was quite surprised yesterday to see reference to an article I wrote several years ago, Data Modeling for the Access Newcomer is an internet newsletter. I am not going to name the newsletter here because I don’t want to give it any free publicity. You won’t find it by links that I provide.

The particular newsletter follows the questionable practice of posting teasers about articles with links that lead to a sign-up page for their paid service. Once you have signed up, chances are all you will find is yet another link, this time to another site where the piece was available to you free of charge all the time. So you have just paid for, or at least signed up for a trial of, a service that frequently simply provides you links to pages and sites that a freely available without ever going near their service. If it was a free trial, you can bet they will then be soliciting you for a paid subscription. Definitely don’t buy the subscription unless you feel you are getting real value for your money.

In the case of my article, the full text of the article is freely available in Garry Robinson’s excellent VB123 blog. Garry recently purchased rights to the best years of Smart Access magazine (the years when Peter Vogel was the editor.) You can purchase electronic versions of sets of the magazine from Garry’s vb123 site if you are interested in a set of excellent articles that spanned the years from October 1996 to April 2006. That is almost 10 years of monthly issues with articles by hundreds of Access experts.

If you are just interested in my article, this link Data Modeling for the Access Newcomer, will take you to the full text of the article. Garry is very generously publishing the full text of individual Smart Access articles in his blog. He has a convenient index to the Smart Access articles.

There is an old expression that says, “Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk free?” While the expression can have a somewhat off-colour meaning, depending on its context, I think it deserves a paraphrase here, “Why pay for a link when you can get to the real article free?” If someone is trying to sell you links, use your favourite search engine to find your own links. It won’t cost you a cent.