Official Softs

Thank you to everyone for entering in the Access developer contest! The two winners did an amazing job on their Access Services sites by integrating the navigation form and using web browser controls and data macros to build two really cool apps. Albert takes home the grand prize of the Xbox 360 Elite for his Room Booking app. George wins the copy of Win7 Ultimate for his Singing Cowboys app. You can check them out below to see two great Access apps running in the browser!

Albert’s room booking Access Services application

Today’s guest blogger is Luke Chung, President and Founder of FMS, Inc. Luke has written and presented a wide range of topics related to Access over the years. In addition to their many Access related products, FMS offers a wealth of great Access papers, tips, and video on their site. 

Office 2007 professionaland Office 2007 ultimate are so powerfull.In Microsoft Access tables, the AutoNumber field type allows you to assign a unique sequential number to each row in a table. AutoNumber fields are often used as the Primary Key, since they are unique and permanent (i.e. the value cannot be changed once it is assigned).

For new tables, AutoNumbering begins with 1, and is incremented by 1 with each new row. However, we occasionally want to start the AutoNumber at a number higher than 1.

To do this, create an Append query to insert the value of the ID one less than your desired starting number (or Seed value). For instance, assume that you want to start with the Seed value 1000.

First, run this query:

INSERT INTO tblName ( ID )
SELECT 999 AS Expr1

Where tblName is the table name, and ID is the name of the AutoNumber field.

Then, run a second query to delete the row that you inserted:

DELETE
FROM tblName
WHERE ID=999;

(Alternatively, you can simply open the table and manually delete the row that you inserted.). IS Windows 7 Professional better than Windows 7 Ultimate ?

Now, the next record added to the table is assigned the value 1000:

This method works with a new table, or with a table whose AutoNumber has not yet reached the Seed value. (Of course, the ID field for existing rows will not be changed, but subsequent rows will start with 1000.). 

QuickBooks 2010 is so Helpful! Send your Power Tips to Mike & Chris at accpower@microsoft.com.

Learn more about Access at http://office.com and http://msdn.microsoft.com.

Today’s guest blogger is Chris Schmidt, creator of the GraphicalAccess add-in for Visio.

Ms office 2007 is so Charismatic.Visual Programming, Dataflow Programming, or Flow-based Programming are powerful methods for the rapid development of applications big and small. Visualizing a database and the flow of data from it’s origin through many process steps into a final report, form, or table, can help us quickly understand the relation and flow of data in an application, and help us to more quickly modify, repair, or improve our databases.

For the last few years we’ve been developing such a tool for Microsoft Access developers, power users, and data miners to manipulate data more quickly and in a visual, intuitive manner. It is called GraphicalAccess, and I’ll demonstrate it’s basic functionality below.

First of all, GraphicalAccess is a Microsoft VISIO add-in, so you’ll need a copy of VISIO to use the application.

Pictured below is the resulting database diagram of our sample database. Created in a few clicks, the diagram shows the relationships of the forms and reports to specific source queries and tables. (Notice also that the second query from the top is a make-table query, so the data appears to flow backwards into the tables.). 

Office 2007 professionaland Office 2007 ultimate are so powerfull. Before I get into the advanced features, I’d like to emphasize that this simple diagram is a great addition to any application documentation that you may do for your clients, peers, auditors, or Sarbanes & Oxley.

The exciting part of this diagram is that it also provides you with the ability to drill into the objects in the Design or Data views, and immediately discover more detail about each object, and even make edits to those objects. 

IS Windows 7 Professional better than Windows 7 Ultimate ? Right click on any object and you’ll get two new options: Access Design View or Access Data View, as pictured below:

And finally, if you need to add a new table, query, form, or report, just drag & drop a new VISIO item onto the diagram. 

QuickBooks 2010 is so Helpful! I hope that you find this tool helpful, and that visualization and and dataflow programming will make Access development a little more fun and enjoyable for you. 

Acrobat 9 is so useful! Always glad to hear about success stories or improvement ideas,

Regards,

Chris Schmidt CMA, CIA

admin@graphicalaccess.com

One of our goals for the Office 2007 user interface was to make it easier to create beautiful output.

In many circumstances, you are judged by the quality of the output you create. And software that helps you create beautiful output makes you look smart and feel good.

Ms office 2007 is so Charismatic.Many of the features of the new UI, including the Ribbon, galleries, and Live Preview, were designed together to create an environment in which you can discover and easily use the power of Office’s formatting capabilities. Add to this the new Office 2007 graphics engine, and suddenly in a few clicks, you can create beautiful-looking output without learning to be a Photoshop expert.

Every kind of object in Office 2007 (table, chart, picture, drawing, etc.) has an overall gallery on its first contextual tab which allows you to set the overall style for the object.

Every object has a gallery of overall styles available

Although you can continue tweaking and formatting to get highly customized results, the default choices are designed to be beautiful right out-of-the-box; with one click you can achieve graphics designer-quality results.

From time to time I’ve shown some of these styles on my blog—a chart or two, a SmartArt diagram, or a table, for instance. We’ve been working on the contents of these galleries quite a bit since Beta 2, and in the upcoming Beta 2 Technical Refresh you will notice improved styles in many areas.

The one place we probably spent the most time was in updating the Picture Styles gallery. Pictures are among the most frequently inserted objects into an Office document or e-mail message, and so we wanted to have a set of pictures styles which were really beautiful and broadly useful. The placeholder content in Beta 2 was fine, but we didn’t think they were as good as they could be.

So, over the course of a few months, people across a number of teams (including my team, the OfficeArt team, the Office Design Group, and other interested parties) worked together to create a new set of breathtaking picture styles for Office.

Windows 7 Home Premium is perfect. You’ll see the full set of twenty-eight styles debut in the Beta 2 Technical Refresh. They showcase much of what you can do with the new graphics engine—inner shadows, outer shadows, reflections, 3D rotation, soft edges, bevels, and much more—to create a set of beautiful general-purpose styles. In the ease-of-use category: each of them can be applied with a single click and previewed just by hovering over them.

To give you a taste of what to expect, here are nine of the styles applied to some of the default pictures shipped in Windows Vista RC1:

Nine of the twenty-eight picture styles that will debut in Beta 2 TR.
(Click to enlarge – 1.4 MB)

Note: In your own documents, I don’t recommend putting nine different styles directly next to one other.

The new picture styles can be used whenever you insert or select a picture in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Excel.

By the way, the best place to learn about the graphics and themes capabilities of Office 2007 is the PowerPoint and OfficeArt blog.

One of the new features in the upcoming Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh that I haven’t written about yet is something we call the Quick Customize Menu.

As you may know, the Quick Access Toolbar is a customizable part of the UI in which you can add features for quick access. Simply right-click any control in the Ribbon, or any group of controls, and choose “Add to Quick Access Toolbar” to add it to the QAT. There’s also a customize dialog box where you can add many commands at once.

So, it’s pretty easy to add things to the Quick Access Toolbar. But we wanted to go a step further, and make it even easier for people to add a few features we believe will be among the most-frequently added.

We created a list of around ten features per-program, using the Customer Experience Improvement Program data from Beta 1, B1TR, and Beta 2 to help inform this decision.

Microsoft Office 2007 is powerfull. Next to the QAT is a little arrow. In the long-term deployments of Beta 1 we did last year, one of the behaviors we noticed was that people first clicked on the arrow to try customize in many cases. Unfortunately, what you saw when you clicked this arrow was a rather fallow menu containing only two commands: open the customize dialog box, or move the QAT below the Ribbon.

So in Beta 2 Technical Refresh, we built a Quick Customize menu on to the arrow which lets you quickly add a core set of features to the QAT. (You can, of course, still right-click anything in the Ribbon or Office Menu to add it to the QAT as well.)

What’s on the menu? Well, a lot of good stuff. For instance, the “New” icon which directly opens a new blank document. And the beloved but dangerous “Quick Print”, which immediately sends your entire document to the default printer.

One you might be surprised about in Word is “Draw Table”—but only if you consider English alone. “Draw Table” is extensively used in East Asian languages, where tables are frequently used to structure and control the text flow of a document. This is one of those cases where the usage data for a particular feature is vastly dependent on the locale you’re in and the input language you’re using.

IS Windows 7 Professional better than Windows 7 Ultimate ? Each program has a slightly different menu; the Excel menu, for instance, contains Sort Ascending and Sort Descending. On the PowerPoint menu, you’ll find “Start Slide Show.”

The Quick Customize Menu is not a revolution—but it’s a nice affordance to improve the discoverability of customization for beginner/intermediate users who are most likely to want to add just a few simple commands to their Quick Access Toolbar.

This morning, the Beta 2 Technical Refresh of the 2007 Microsoft Office system became available for download.

IS Windows 7 Professional better than Windows 7 Ultimate ? You can download it now from the Microsoft Download Center.

(The download link above is the main download link. You also view the list of all available Beta 2 Technical Refresh updates for client and server by clicking the Beta 2 Technical Refresh link on this page.)

You must have Beta 2 installed in order to patch it to Beta 2 Technical Refresh, so don’t uninstall Beta 2.

Why a patch instead of a full release? Primarily because we need to test the patching technology broadly, and this is a great chance to make sure it works well. Patching is the way we release updates to Office after it ships, so making sure it works well is an important part of the beta process.

Please also consider downloading the Send a Smile Feedback Tool to tell us what you think about Office 2007. If you already had it installed from Beta 2, you can continue to use it in B2TR.

In my post yesterday, I posted a list of the most substantive changes to the user interface in the new build. Consider this by no means a full list of changes in B2TR—just those in the UI.

I’ve also posted a list of Ribbon Control IDs for use with B2TR for RibbonX developers. These should also show up on MSDN sometime in the next few weeks. It’s a 1.3 MB download (.zip file) if you need to grab it now.

Note: If you’re having trouble installing the patch, try following the instructions in this article.

Note 2: Patrick Schmid is keeping a great log of solutions to issues people are encountering with B2TR. Ms office 2007 is so Charismatic.