If you’re considering migrating from Access 2003 to Access 2010 (or perhaps you’re already in the process of doing so), there’s a new resource on Office.com that gives you a high-level overview of the changes in the new version: the Access 2010 Migration Guide. The guide walks you through new features such as the ribbon interface, the Naviga.. more »

Two recent papers written by Luke Chung of FMS, Inc. about SQL Azure and Access have created a lot of interest on his blog, as well as a few linked forum discussions. In response, Luke has written a follow-up paper about deploying an Access database once it’s linked to SQL Azure. He has also revised his original paper about linking to SQL Azure to.. more »

I've recently discovered an easy way to scale Access Chart objects at runtime to fit the form window, and I'd like to share it with you. Scaling an Access Chart means that when the end-user resizes the chart form window, the chart resizes to fit the new window size. It also means that when the Access window and form are maximized, the chart will .. more »

One challenge in Access Services is ensuring that the logic behind various objects will be portable between Access itself and the SharePoint site hosting the Access web database. To that end, the Access team has used macros to support the goal of portability. In practical terms, this means we cannot use VBA behind the Access objects in context of a .. more »

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have some very interesting UI features including the ability to pin files, such as Word .docx, Excel .xlsx, Access .accdb or even Notepad .txt files to the taskbar. Fellow Access MVP Glenn Lloyd wrote an excellent article describing this feature at Windows 7 – Pinning Applications to the Task Bar . Taskbar pi.. more »

Luke Chung has published a couple of white papers about Access and SQL Azure. You can read Luke’s blog post here, or link to the papers directly here: Microsoft Azure and Cloud Computing...What it Means to Me and Information Workers Microsoft Access and Cloud Computing with SQL Azure Databases (Linking to SQL Server Tables in th.. more »

A couple of months ago, we posted a blog entry on how to use Access 2010 with SQL Azure . At that time, the easiest way to migrate your Access data to SQL Azure was to first migrate the tables and data to a non-Azure SQL Server then to use SQL Server tools to migrate these items to a SQL Azure database. Today, we are pleased to let you know that .. more »

Many of the Access projects I’ve developed have used VBA extensively, and the more I became involved in developing user interfaces, the more I saw a need to customize the behavior of the controls that Access provides. Developing this sort of solution gave me the architecture to be able to develop much more complicated control interactions and ae.. more »

SmithBridge(the guys behind AccessHosting.com) have a new offering that will take the work out of converting your existing Access databases to Web databases that can run on SharePoint.  They will check your database to see if it conforms to meet the SharePoint requirements, analyze  the data and update the tables to conform to the Compatibility Ch.. more »

Today’s Power Tip comes from Bob Larson of BTAB Development. Bob is a former Access MVP (2008-2009, 2009-2010), and offers a host of tips and code snippets on his site. If you have a long list of items to exclude from a query, and you don’t want to type a big IN statement in the query to exclude them, you can use a table to do the exclusions inst.. more »

Jeff ConradJeff Conrad, our resident “Access Junkie” on the test team, has updated his website to include lots of information concerning Access 2010 and Access Services. He has added new MSDN article links, Access blog links, Access online forum links, and a new Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page on Access 2010. You can find Jeff’s website at the.. more »

Dick Moffat is a professional Access developer who has been using Access 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 to build databases that run on Windows but live in SharePoint. We have a chat about how you can leverage your existing Access skills and bring your current databases into SharePoint to make sharing databases and working with users in remote .. more »

is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. There are already several OData producers like: IBM WebSphere, Microsoft SQL Azure, SQL Server Reporting Services; and live services like: Netflix or DBpedia among others. SharePoint 2010, is an OData .. more »

We’re excited to announce that a longstanding Access tradition continues. A new version of the Northwind sample database has just been released. The best way to get to the template is to start up Access 2010, under , and then click on You can also get the template here: As before, Northwind shows you what an Inventory/Orders system might look li.. more »

It seems so simple and you've done it many times before. You have a Microsoft Access ACCDB database (from Access 2007 or 2010) and want to save it (convert it) to a Microsoft Access MDB format database so it can be used by Access 2003 or earlier: Access 2007 File SaveAs Command for Database Conversion Unfortunately, when you try this in Microsoft .. more »

I am currently developing a terminology managing database for my main occupation, which is translation. The interface is mainly made of 2 parts, one for the search and one for the display of the found information. That second pane can typically include one or several of entries, plus one or several topics, links to Web pages, etc., like in the .. more »

A question came in recently regarding whether you can password protect just the VBA code for an Access database, but not the rest of the database. The answer is yes! Here’s how to do it: , and then close and reopen the database. Next time you go to view the VBA code, you’ll be prompted for the password. Note that there are a lot of free or inex.. more »

Today’s guest writer is Barath Balasubramanian a Design Engineer in the Access test team. As the excitement about the 2010 world cup in South Africa intensified, I set out to build an application to gather predictions on the results of the tournament from my team mates. Since all of my team mates have access to a SharePoint server, I decided to bu.. more »

Abigail one of our amazing software engineer’s on the Access team was featured in an Intro to Access 2010 Video. Learn more about all the new Office 2010 applications at http://www.office2010themovie.com/.. more »

When you are in the process of entering a new record in an Access database, you can press the Escape key to cancel the entry of the record. However, some events, such as clicking or tabbing into a subform on the main form, can save the record on the main form. At that point, you can't press Escape to cancel the entry—you must use the Delete co.. more »