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 »

, the term “VLOOKUP” frequently bubbles up in our list of high-volume search queries. My job is to figure out why this is and what specific information people are actually looking for when they type “VLOOKUP” into the search box in Help or on our web site. The “VLOOKUP” query appears to represent a bunch of different questions. Certainly, o.. more »

how to quickly create rules to help rid your Inbox of so-called graymail. This week I wanted to share another tool for making sure the right email messages stick out when you’re reading down the message list in your Inbox. This advice comes straight out of the Outlook Best Practices – a series of guidelines to help you be as productive as poss.. more »

news about our new themes , you may have noticed that the Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog also announced the ability to insert Clip Art in the PowerPoint Web App. High quality images and more Many of you may be wondering why you should be excited by this. Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “Clip Art” is this frie.. 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 »

This week’s post is written by Amy Miller. Amy is a writer for Office.com. She’s written and edited content for Excel, Access, OneNote, and InfoPath. Imagine you’re working in a spreadsheet and you innocently press the arrow keys on your keyboard to move to another cell, but instead of moving to another cell, the entire spreadsheet moves. You may ha.. 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 »

Many of you have posted comments on our previous posts asking for help with specific features or questions with Outlook 2010. While we enjoy hearing your thoughts about Outlook, we cannot support individual users via blog comments. That’s why we want to introduce you to , a community forum where you can post questions and receive responses from ot.. more »

Can you think of the last time you went to the cinema to see a long movie? Whether a drama, a comedy or an action-packed thriller, if you had some pop-corn with soda, at some point you probably felt the need to relieve yourself. As the images flash back in front of your eyes in a cool and futuristic warping white light, can you recall what were you .. more »

Today’s blog post is brought to you by Roxanne Kenison. Roxanne is a writer on Office.com who writes primarily about Office Web Apps and Office Starter. My son starts Kindergarten this fall. I’m excited, but a little sad that our days of co-op preschool are over. Our local community college sponsors a where parents run the preschool. Each pare.. 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 »

Last week I needed to send an email to a contact at Contoso, a company we partner with on marketing materials. Unfortunately, I had not emailed my contact in about a year and I couldn’t remember her name, let alone her email address. Since we had only exchanged a few emails I had neglected to add her to my Outlook contacts. However, with Outlook 20.. more »

Today’s blog post is brought to you by Gary Willoughby. Gary is a writer on Office.com who has created and edited content about Excel, Access, and Project. Sometimes, I find I have text in a cell that spans far past its own column or…yikes, maybe even off the screen. Because I tend to be a little borderline compulsive, that bothers me just a bit... 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 »

During the summer season, I like to travel and visit my family and friends. Before I leave the office for my trips, I share these important dates with my colleagues so they know that I won’t be around the office. Instead of sending an email message to my colleagues with a list of dates, I prefer to include a visual representation of my calendar. I .. more »

Enable Iterative Calculations. After selecting your level and difficulty and clicking Play, the game begins. - Creeps come in "waves" of four. Each wave, they get stronger - They require stronger bullets to kill ( ), and reward you with more cash once killed ( ). These stats are under the Creeps part of the menu. - To buy a tower, click on one of .. 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 »