and created a donations application that ran in the browser. I thought it would be helpful to provide some background to the vision and direction. Years ago I came across a post on UtterAccess that articulately described what we hope to accomplish with Access 2010. Reading between the lines a littleStormin wants to keep all the goodness of the .. more »

Im happy to announce that a new member has joined the Outlook platform family. The new arrival has a long and formal name known as Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Provider Extensibility, but the name shouldnt stop you from getting acquainted with this exciting new extensibility feature for Outlook 2010! The Microsoft Outlook Social Connector is .. more »

Excel Services does a good job of rendering Excel spreadsheets with a high degree of fidelity. In other words, what you see in Excel is what you will see in Excel Services. Excel, however, is incredibly feature rich, comprising features added over decades of development. By comparison, Excel Services is a young product, so naturally Excel Services .. more »

Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of the public beta of Access 2010, Access 2010 Runtime, and SharePoint 2010. You can download Office and SharePoint at Access 2010--The 10,000 ft. View Last month Ryan and I gave the first public demo on Channel 9 . If you havent see itdefinitely interesting for Access users. See the for more .. more »

Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of the public Beta of Microsoft Office 2010! Betas for Office 2010, as well as SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 are available for download at . This is an exciting and significant milestone for both the Office and Outlook teams, because it means that for the first time, anyone can .. more »

We are excited to announce the Outlook Social Connector! The Outlook Social Connector is a set of new features to help keep track of your friends and colleagues while enabling you to grow your professional network. The Outlook Social Connector is available now as part of the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta. The Outlook Social Connector (OSC) brings .. more »

Today, we are announcing the availability of the PowerPoint 2010 Beta.  It is a public download that anyone can try for free. What can you do with PowerPoint 2010? Collaborate more effectively with Co-Authoring .. more »

Today is an exciting day! At PDC we announced the availability of the public betas of Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010 and Office Web Apps for business customers. If youd like to be one of the millions of people who try, test and give feedback on the latest and greatest, you can download the betas at We also .. more »

Following on the heels of the Office 2010 beta availability announcement, the Office Web Apps blog has a new post discussing deploying office web apps in the enterprise.  Have a read if you're looking to test drive the beta version of Office Web Apps... more »

We are thrilled to announce the release of the public Beta of Microsoft Word 2010! Betas for Office 2010, as well as SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 are available for you to download We've talked in a bit of detail about the goodness of Word 2010 in , and our friends in marketing put together a handy top 10 list . In addition .. more »

As we all know, a List Box control has a Fore Color property. It sets the fore color for column values and headers simultaneously. Also, we know that table and query fields have a , where color formatting can be set. For example, you can format a number field as As stated in Access 97, 2003 and 2007 help, "If you set a field's So when creating a .. more »

Web databases introduced a few ribbon design challenges, particularly how to present client and web create options? We wanted to make sure that people creating client objects are just as successful as web objects. When you create a new database from scratch, you have two options: either to open a blank database or a blank Web database. Creating a .. more »

Your task: create a presentation. There are lots of ways to approach this depending on what youre trying to convey to your audience, and there are many things to consider: the message, content, flow, slide design, aesthetics, and a variety of other factors involved in storytelling. Sometimes its helpful to start with a template. This way, you can .. more »

Todays author is Jan Karel Pieterse, an Excel MVP. You can find more useful tips from Jan Karel on his website: . This post informs you about Name Manager, a free utility that helps you manage defined names in your workbooks. If you need a free utility to manage defined names in your workbooks, this one is a must-have. List all names in your active .. more »

Ongoing management is key to any successful server products deployment. It can be challenging to figure out the right initial combination of settings, and to know how to further change those settings when problems arise. With that in mind, I have put this blog article together to go into whats new in the Excel Services administration space. First .. more »

A very good article by Armen Stein, Access MVP .. more »

Example with detailed steps: Consuming .NET components within Access/VBA .. more »

Todays guest writer is Wouter Steenbergen, a PM on the Access team responsible for Access form and report designers. If you want to build an easy to use application it always starts with a good navigation model that allows users to quickly perform the most common tasks and easily find the less common tasks. Years ago, Access introduced the concept .. more »

Daniel is the Training Director at , which specializes in providing custom training solutions in Microsoft Office products. I always thought it was cool to be able to sort a list by clicking the column heading once, for ascending order then once more for descending order. A while ago I decided to tackle this feature in an Access form. The buttons .. more »

Todays guest blogger is Darren Myher. Darren is the VP Operations of Every company has something that makes their business unique a competitive advantage that needs to be supported and enhanced by the software they choose to run their business. Using Microsoft Access as the front end UI to a SQL Server back-end allows Blue Link to build and .. more »