Argee's Access Blog

The Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering Blog has announced a May 12, 2010 worldwide launch date for “the 2010 set of products, including Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010” for business users. Office 2010 will be available for consumers on-line and in retail outlets in June 2010.  If you want to have an sneak preview look at what is coming you can download the beta at www.office.com/beta.

I have been poking around the Access 2010 beta for the last while and I think it is going to be a nice version to work with. In case you are wondering, the Ribbon stays. In fact, I believe that the Fluent User Interface as the Ribbon is officially, will now be found throughout the Office suite. The Office Button has been replaced with a File tab on the ribbon. This tab leads to the backstage of each application.

Quote of the Day

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

- Thomas H. Huxley

The single-most exciting new development as far as Access is concerned is that it is now possible to develop Access Web Databases and publish them to SharePoint. Ryan McMinn present this new development in this video.

If you are interested in general Office development, have a look at John Durant's presentation.

Pej Javaheri and Steve Tullis present Excel and Excel Services 2010 developments in this video.

All in all , Office 2010 looks pretty exciting with lots of new ‘stuff’ to learn but with big paybacks for taking the time you will spend on learning.

As a design principle, I apply a naming convention when creating new database objects. For example, field names begin with a lowercase letter. Recently, I was putting together a small application in Access 2010 beta so that  I could gain a little familiarity with the new Access version that will be released later this year. In a weak moment, I accidentally named some of the fields in a new table with uppercase first letters.

In the grand scheme of things, this is not a particularly serious problem but inconsistently formed names lend an unprofessional look to an application. When I tried to correct the names I discovered an inconvenient quirk. After replacing the first letter of each field name with its lowercase equivalent, saving and closing the table and then re-opening it again in design view, I found that the first letter of each field name had changed back to uppercase.

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the lower-case letter to ‘stick.’ That’s when I turned to my favourite forum for help. Thanks to UtterAccess VIP member (and Access MVP) datAdrenaline, I quickly had a reasonably workable solution.

Quote of the Day

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people who are convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another.

- Ellen Goodman

All I had to do is change the first letter of each field name I wanted to modify, save and close the table, re-open the table and replace whatever I had entered as the first letter of the temporary field name back to the lowercase letter with which I wanted to start the name. Step by step this is the method I applied:

• open the table in design view
• pre-fix each field name with a single letter
• delete and replace the original uppercased letter
• save and close the table
• reopen the table in design view
• remove the leading character for each field to correct name
• save and close the table

This problem occurred specifically in Access 2010 beta so it may be a non-issue when the new version is released but if you run into similar situations perhaps a similar approach will help you out of a bind “when all else fails.”

New articles in Access Wiki

Links

CamelCase

Access: What is it?

Clint Covington posted  Access 2010 deprecated features and components in the Access Product Team Blog yesterday that certain features have been deprecated in Access 2010:

• Calendar Control
• Snapshot Format
• Data Access Pages
• Paradox, Lotus, and Red2 ISAM’s
• Replication conflict viewer

If you have applications developed in older Access versions that you want to port to Access 2010, read Clint's article to see what effect these changes will have on your application and some suggested workarounds.You should also keep these deprecations in mind for any new applications you may develop in pre-2010 Access versions.

Check out this Access Team Blog article in which Wouter Steenbergen describes new navigation features in Access 2010 in detail

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.