Hiding the Navigation Pane with VBA

Once you have created an Access Database Application to be used by other people, it may well be important for you to prevent users from gaining access to any of its design features. By this I mean, you may not want users to modify your tables, forms and queries etc in design view (inadvertently or…

new table

Creating a Make Table Query

Before we create the Make Table Query, you might like to create a new blank database file. This is so we have a separate database into which we can paste the new table from the query. In this exercise I have called it HistoricData.accdb. Here is the procedure to create a Make Table Query: Open…

Truthy and Falsy Values

“Truthy” and “Falsy” Values

VBA is quite very loose in what it deems “truthy” and “falsy”. For example, this procedure can produce surprising result:

At the first glance, it seems expected that if the bit field is set to 1, it would succeed. But in fact, it wouldn’t because True is equivalent to -1, not 1. Unless we…

Prefer compile time errors over run time errors

In VBA, there are several features that allow us to do things that may not be checked at the compile time. In particular, it is possible to write several late-bound expressions which means that it can potentially contain run-time errors. One common misconception about late-binding is that it’s a matter of adding a reference and…

Access 2003

Microsoft Access 2003 Language Reference [Access 2003 VBA Language Reference]

This reference contains conceptual overviews, programming tasks, samples, and references to guide you in developing solutions based on Microsoft Access. The reference contains the following sections: What’s New: Provides a list of new members by object and in alphabetical order. Concepts: Provides important concepts for developing custom Access solutions. Reference: Provides reference materials for the Access…

Access 2003

Access 2003 Technical Articles

In this section of the MSDN Library, you’ll find technical articles that demonstrate how to build and deploy complex Access 2003 runtime-based solutions, automate Access from another application; use the new XML features in Access 2003, and even how you can animate Access 2003. You can use the TOC to your left to navigate through…

drag and drop in Access

Drag & Drop and Conditional Sorting in Microsoft Access

Drag and Drop In MS Access Doug was on a roll in January of 2004 when he wrote his article on drag and drop in MS Access. He tested it now using Access 2016 and it still works. This article shows you how to add drag-and-drop to your Access application using combinations of multi-value and…

Normalize all constraints’ & indices’ names

Constraints that are created by SSMA or by user via SSMS tend to have ugly names. Worse, auto-generated names are not stable across backups. Meaning if you restore a new database based on a copy of another database, the constraint names will change. That create huge problems during migrations because scripts that references constraint will…

Use controls, not fields

Sometimes we need to use fields from a RecordSource that aren’t shown on the form. It is legal to reference them directly even if they don’t have a control. For example, we can have a form bound to a RecordSource like so:

And only display CompanyName in a textbox but not show the CompanyID….