Microsoft has officially designated FMS President Luke Chung as a Microsoft MVP for supporting the Microsoft Access community.
Since the official launch of Microsoft Access twenty years ago, Luke Chung has been at the forefront of the Microsoft Access community (read his impression on the day Microsoft Access debuted). He has written numerous articles, spoken at conferences around the world, and collaborated with the Microsoft Access development team over the years. His leadership propelled FMS to the world’s leading developer of commercial products for Microsoft Access with tens of thousands of customers in 100+ countries.
While there are more than 100 million social and technical community members, only a small portion are selected to be recognized as Microsoft MVPs. Each year, around 4,000 MVPs are honored. 982 were recognized on July 1, including Luke. These individuals were chosen because they have demonstrated their deep commitment to helping others make the most of their technology, voluntarily sharing their passion, and real-world knowledge of Microsoft products with the community. Candidates are rigorously evaluated for their technical expertise, community leadership, and voluntary community contributions for the previous year. They come from more than 90 countries, speak over 40 different languages, and are awarded in more than 90 Microsoft technologies. Microsoft Announcement
There are many, many legacy Microsoft Access databases that need to be supported and enhanced. Often the original developer is long gone and there’s little to no documentation available. Yet, you’re expected to take care of it.
No matter what technology it is, taking over someone else’s work is always challenging. It’s even more challenging if you become responsible for a system that you (and no one else) understands.
FMS President Luke Chung explored this topic during his presentation at the Portland Oregon Microsoft Access User Group Conference. Learn about the issues and techniques we’ve learned over the years to triage, enhance, and support Microsoft Access applications, including migrating and upsizing to SQL Server and other platforms.
TechEd is Microsoft’s premier conference for IT professionals and developers. The sold-out conference took place in Orlando, Florida last week.
If you didn’t attend, you can still watch many of the videos from the conference, including the keynotes and other highlights from each day. Visit the TechEd web site and learn about the latest in Microsoft technology.
The announcements this year are stunning with huge advances in Azure, Visual Studio .NET, SkyDrive, LightSwitch, Virtual Machines, and more.
When designing an application and its tables, it’s very important to capture the time dimension and determine how data should be stored with the expectation that it will change over time. While there’s a natural tendency to keep data normalized so that the same information is stored in only one place, the time dimension also needs to be considered.
What Needs to be Preserved Over Time?
Making Sure Data Normalization Doesn’t Lose Historical Data
FMS developer Molly Pell is a guest blogger on the Microsoft Access developer blog. This post demonstrates a neat trick that you can use to filter a Continuous or Split form while your users are typing in a Combo Box.
We are often asked by Microsoft Office power users whether, why, and when they should use Microsoft Access versus Microsoft Excel. Especially when they are very comfortable using MS Excel and don’t understand the reasons why anyone would use MS Access or databases. We’ve written a new paper that describes the issues in detail:
How Microsoft Access and Excel Empower Information Workers
Software System to Manage Impact Aid Suvey Forms for Department of Education Funding
See how our Microsoft Access database application is helping the Washington DC Public System (DCPS) more efficiently and accurately secure their Impact Aid funding from the US Department of Education.
What is Federal Impact Aid for Primary and Secondary Education?
Many local school districts across the United States include within their boundaries parcels of land that are owned by the Federal Government or that have been removed from the local tax rolls by the Federal Government, including Indian lands. These school districts face special challenges — they must provide a quality education to the children living on the Indian and other Federal lands and meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, while sometimes operating with less local revenue than is available to other school districts, because the Federal property is exempt from local property taxes.
The Impact Aid law (now Title VIII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) has been amended numerous times since its inception in 1950. The program continues, however, to support local school districts with concentrations of children who reside on Indian lands, military bases, low-rent housing properties, and other Federal properties, or who have parents in the uniformed services or employed on eligible Federal properties. The law refers to local school districts as local educational agencies, or LEAs.
To secure this funding, school districts send survey forms to their students’ parents, collect the results, and submit the claim to the Department of Education.
Helping the Washington DC Public School System Process their Federal Impact Aid Survey Forms and Secure Funding
As you can imagine, the federal government has a lot of workers and property in Washington, DC that don’t pay local property taxes to fund education.
The Washington DC Public Schools (DCPS) consists of over 100 public elementary and secondary schools and learning centers. Each year DCPS sends out survey forms to determine the residential and parental employment status of their students. This information is used to determine Impact Aid funding for students who live or have parents who work on federal property.
Database Software Solution
By automating a process that was previously performed manually, FMS helped DCPS achieve increased efficiency and accuracy with an easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy, and easy-to-support, multiuser Microsoft Access application.
Professionally designed and deployed, FMS created reports and processes to help DCPS identify a larger number of federally connected families, and file the forms to obtain federal funding.
Results
The application increased funding which more than paid for our services and allows DCPS to devote more resources to their classrooms. The payoff will continue year after year.
Let us know if your school systems could benefit from claiming these Impact Aid funds with our database application.
Microsoft Access Database Documentation and Analysis
300 Ways To Create Better Microsoft Access Applications
FMS is pleased to announce Total Access Analyzer 2010 is now shipping with support for both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Microsoft Access 2010. Total Access Analyzer is the world’s most popular Microsoft Access product winning every Best Access Add-in Award since 1994. This is the tenth major release of Total Access Analyzer since its debut in 1992.
Comprehensive Microsoft Access Database Documentation
Total Access Analyzer examines each Microsoft Access database to provide detailed documentation of individual objects and their relationships to each other. Comprehensive code analysis of VBA module code and macros is also performed. A powerful search features lets you find any string across all the properties, macros, and modules. Over 375 presentation quality reports are available with a wide variety of customization, sorting, and filtering options.
Avoid Crashes Before You Ship
The popularity of Total Access Analyzer is its ability to help Access users and developers improve their applications, avoid errors that can cause their solutions to crash, and learn best practices to increase their skills. By using Total Access Analyzer to take over an existing application, during development, and before deployment as part of one’s quality assurance process, developers can avoid embarrassing mistakes and improve consistency and performance.
Most importantly, Total Access Analyzer detects 300 ways to avoid errors, apply best practices, and improve performance. By leveraging our years of experience and customer feedback, FMS has created the most powerful system for diagnosing Microsoft Access applications. For instance, Total Access Analyzer can detect broken references to tables, fields, forms, reports, macros, and VBA code that will cause the database to crash as soon as they’re encountered. It finds unused objects (tables, queries, forms, and reports), macros, classes, procedures, variables, constants, etc. to help developers get rid of unnecessary and old work.
Advanced analysis is also performed to detect inconsistent field definitions across tables, duplicate SQL definitions, macro command problems, etc. Multi-level object and code relationships are presented with three advanced hierarchical diagrams showing application flow, data flow, and object containership.
Microsoft Access users, developers, and consultants of all levels rely on Total Access Analyzer to deliver great solutions. “Total Access Analyzer is an amazing product that I’ve relied on and recommended for years,” said Sal Ricciardi Programming Writer for Microsoft Corporation. “It’s a huge time saver.”
Total Access Analyzer 2010 adds many enhancements in addition to supporting both 32 and 64 bit versions of Microsoft Access 2010. Its VBA module code parser now supports the conditional compiler syntax (e.g. #If VBA7 Then) that’s common for supporting 32 and 64 bit environments. There’s advanced macro documentation and analysis that includes a “macro compiler” to validate if macro commands have the proper number of parameters. Improved views and reports simplify the review and printouts of macro lines scattered in embedded macros across the forms and reports. New temporary variable analysis documents and detects undefined and unused TempVars set by macros and modules. A variety of other new suggestions were added to detect timer event inconsistencies, query performance enhancement opportunities, and reserved word conflicts with the upcoming SQL Server 2012. With all the new features, Total Access Analyzer remains the most powerful diagnostic tool for Microsoft Access databases.
“Total Access Analyzer provides the comprehensive documentation and analysis that empowers Access users and developers to takeover existing Access applications and enhance them,” said Luke Chung, President and founder of FMS. “Total Access Analyzer offers a cost-effective way to understand what’s going on in a database, detect errors, improve quality, and learn Best Practices. It should be part of the quality assurance process during development and certainly before shipping. If it doesn’t pass Total Access Analyzer’s review, it’s not ready for deployment. It’s fundamental to our own Access development efforts.”
Availability and Pricing
Total Access Analyzer 2010 is available immediately from FMS for $299. Existing owners of Total Access Analyzer can upgrade for only $199. Total Access Analyzer is available via ESD and also comes with a professionally printed user manual and CD.
When working with ComboBoxes and ListBoxes, we often find the need to select the first item in the list by default. This can be done when the form loads, or when the rowsource values of the ListBox or ComboBox are changed.
We’ve written a new paper containing an explanation and sample database of how to do this with the ItemData(0) property.
Our example database contains a form with a ComboBox containing ProductCategoties, and a ListBox containing Products.
When the form loads, it selects the first Category in the list. When the Category is changed, the Products list is updated, and the first product is selected.
Access 2010 Programmer's Reference (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)
by Teresa Hennig, Rob Cooper, Geoffrey Griffith, and Jerry Dennison
Written by our long-time friends who are Microsoft MVPs and members of the Microsoft Access development team, Teresa Hennig, Rob Cooper, Geoffrey Griffith and Jerry Dennison wrote Microsoft Access 2010 Programmer's Reference, which also applies to Microsoft Access 2007.
Thanks to a special arrangement with the authors and their publisher, Wrox, we are pleased to offer a limited quantity of this book for FREE to purchasers of any of our Access product suites. A $45 value.
Here’s a paper and PowerPoint presentation: 
Helping the Washington DC Public School System Process their Federal Impact Aid Survey Forms and Secure Funding
Database Software Solution
by Teresa Hennig, Rob Cooper, Geoffrey Griffith, and Jerry Dennison