We are excited to announce the release of Total Access Memo 2021! Total Access Memo lets you add rich text format (RTF) memos to Microsoft Access with sophisticated editing and spell checking. Our super-easy data binding means you can display rich text on your forms and reports and store it in your tables.
Give your users the ability to add text with different fonts, point sizes, fonts styles (bold, italics, underline, etc.), bullet points, tabs, paragraph margins, indentations, alignment, spacing between paragraphs, color, graphics, hyperlinks, etc .
Total Access Memo 2021 is an upgrade from the 2007 version and includes these enhancements:
Support for 64-bit Versions of Access/Office including 365
Backwards Compatibility
Improved Rich Text Editor
Enhanced Sample Database
Updated Manual and Help File
New Setup and Distribution Programs
Download the free trial to experience it for yourself.
Existing Total Access Memo owners are eligible to upgrade at a discounted price.
Contact Tracing is critical to minimizing the spread of COVID-19 in your community. Coronavirus infections are particularly dangerous to vulnerable populations such as retirement homes, elderly family members, medical providers, and front-line service personnel. By collecting and managing the data of your population, you are prepared if and when an outbreak occurs.
The FMS Advanced Systems Group developed Sentinel Visualizer to visualize complex relationships hidden in traditional rows and columns. For instance, schools can store relatively static data on their students, teachers, staff, classes, clubs, sports, siblings, family members, etc. When positive tests occur, one can find common links to quickly identify those who need to be tested and quarantined while limiting the impact on the wider community.
Ebo Quansah from the Microsoft Access Team announced problems with decimal fields using the current Microsoft Access Build 12827.20010 that was released with the Monthly cycle. Decimal fields are not commonly used in Access database files, but they are used in linked SQL Server tables.
June 24, 2020 Update
The Microsoft Team has announced that the Decimal Field issue has been fixed in all channels.
Current Channel – Version 2005, Build 12827.20470 (User may need to force a manual update to get the version.)
Current Channel (Preview) – Version 2006, Build 13001.20198
There’s a new build update (13001.20198) released on June 18, 2020 for Current Channel (Preview) that has been reported to solve the issue related to using SQL/VBA to write to a Number Data type with a Decimal field size.
June 8, 2020, from Ebo Quansah
Very soon, we will ship a new data type, known as Date & Time Extended, which enhances syntax compatibility with SQL while increasing accuracy & level of detail in date & time records.
While the feature is not yet enabled in Current Channel builds, most of the code for the feature is in the product in an inactive state. Nonetheless, we are aware of a problem that currently exists with this new code. As of today, if you are on version 2005, build 12827.20010 or greater, and you manipulate Decimal fields (Access DataType=Number/FieldSize=Decimal, or SQL DataType=Decimal) using DAO (Data Access Objects), you might have identified your app crashing.
If you hover a variable with the type in VBA code, you may see that the field is not being displayed properly; either reading as ‘?????’ or giving a Type Mismatch error, or Access may crash.
We are very sorry for the inconvenience this causes in your Access app. The Access team is working on resolving this issue as soon as possible, and we will report back to you once this error has been fixed. In the interim, we’d recommend for you to roll back to a previous version (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2770432/how-to-revert-to-an-earlier-version-of-office-2013-or-office-2016-clic), or switch to a slower channel (e.g Monthly Enterprise Channel, or SemiAnnual Channel), until the issue is fixed in Current Channel.
The issue only impacts Decimal types so if avoiding DAO code that manipulates Decimal types is possible, we’d advise this as a short term solution.
FMS President Luke Chung was a presenter at the Virtual Microsoft Access DevCon 2020 in Vienna, Austria on April 23, 2020. He gave a presentation called “Remote access to Access“, which is available for everyone to watch.
If you missed the event, you can visit Virtual Access DevCon 2020 to watch all the presentations giving by all of the speakers.
Luke Chung’s video presentation
Remote Desktop and RemoteApp let your users run Access applications without having to installing anything on their local machine. That includes Access, the database, and any related programs. It lets users run the program across the network or Internet, from their PC or even a Mac. There are different approaches depending on whether the host is internal or in the cloud, and for backend databases in Access and Microsoft SQL Server.
PowerPoint Slides for the Presentation
Special thanks to Microsoft Access MVP Karl Donaubauer, who hosted the fourth annual Access DevCon and made it an online event during the COVID-19 lockdown.
FMS President Luke Chung attended the 2019 Portland Access User Group Conference in Silver Falls, Oregon. While there, Luke explored the beautiful Silver Falls State Park with fellow Microsoft Access Developers. Here are some of the breath taking photos. For more information on the PAUG 2019 conference, visit the Portland Access User Group site.
Microsoft Access Developers Molly and Alison Balter.
Here are some photos from the 2019 Netherlands Access Developer Day Conference. FMS President Luke Chung gave a presentation on the Microsoft Access Database Evolution from the Desktop to the Cloud. For more information on the NADD 2019 conference, visit Netherlands Access Developer Day.
Luke speaking at the NADD Conference.
Luke talking about the Access products FMS provides.
Luke giving his presentation on Access Database Evolution.
Luke and other Microsoft Access Developers at the NADD 2019 Conference.
Luke enjoying the beautiful canals in Amsterdam.
Luke went and visited the Maritime Museum.
Inside the VR Room on the ship. This let you experience what life a board the ship would have been like.
FMS President Luke Chung and Daniel Polak inside a Cheese Shop.
Microsoft Office 365 makes it easy to create mailboxes. For no additional cost, email aliases can be created and assigned to a mailbox. For instance, sales@domain.com and support@domain.com could be aliases assigned to specific people’s accounts. That makes it easy to maintain a general address that’s assigned to whomever is currently responsible for it.
Setting Up Aliases
Before adding an email alias to a user, you must have admin permission to do so.
In the admin center, choose Users > Active users
Select the user > Manage email aliases
You won’t be able to see this option if the user does not have a license assigned.
Select [+ Add an Alias] and enter a new alias for the user.
Click [Save changes].
It may take up to 24 hours for the new alias to populate throughout Office 365.
When the email appears in the user’s Inbox and they reply, the FROM address is their email address. The alias is not the FROM address.
This makes it useful to have dedicated mailboxes rather than aliases. Someone can monitor the mailbox and respond from it. With Office 365, it’s easy to have an internet browser with Outlook opened to that account.
Unfortunately, it’s inconvenient to log in to the mailbox, and if it rarely receives emails, it’s easy to forget. It’d be much better to be notified at your regular email address when an email arrives.
Forwarding Email Messages
Microsoft allows you to easily forward your emails from your Office 365 account to another email account on Office 365 or external accounts such as Gmail or Yahoo. It’s very helpful for monitoring mailbox that are rarely used (e.g. webmaster, info, etc).
At the top of the page, click the Settings icon, then at the bottom of the panel, click on “View all Outlook settings”.
Choose Forwarding and enter in the email you would like your Office 365 emails to be sent to. There is an option that allows you to keep a copy of your forwarded messages so you can still log into that account and respond to them.
To connect to a Microsoft SQL Server database, it requires a login which includes a user name and password. Each database server has a login with administrator permissions that allows the creation and deletion of databases.
Often, this login is distributed which creates a security problem. Developers and end-users shouldn’t have administrator permissions to perform their tasks. Their permissions should be managed for each database.
Database User Permissions
Microsoft SQL Server makes it easy to create and manage database permissions. The permissions you grant are called roles and users are able to have multiple roles. Here are some examples of the permissions you are able to assign to users.
Full Database Permissions (Owner)
This allows the database developer full rights to make modifications to the database objects.
Editing Permissions (Writer)
End-users who need to add, delete and change data in user tables.
Read Only Permissions (Reader)
Only allows the end-user to view data in the user tables.
Read our Microsoft SQL Server Users and Permissions paper for more information on how to do this and some pitfalls to avoid. It applies to SQL Server whether it’s installed on premise or in the Azure cloud.
Having Microsoft Azure host SQL Server databases on their servers is very cost-effective and efficient. Within minutes, one can have a SQL Server database hosted in the cloud and available to applications on the cloud or on premise.
As with all cloud resources, and especially databases, security is a huge concern. Fortunately, SQL Azure includes features to restrict what can connect to your database server but you need to know how to use them and realize that the default settings do not protect you best.
Setting Firewalls and Virtual Networks
This is an important feature for cloud solutions so that only permitted sources are allowed to get data from your server and databases. You can set the IP Addresses you allow at the database level and server level. The database settings take precedence over the server settings.
Cannot Open Server Error
If you try to connect to the database from an unauthorized IP address, it triggers an error like this:
Cannot open server ‘ServerName’ requested by the login. Client with IP address ‘111.222.33.44’. is not allowed to access the server. To enable access, use the Windows Azure Management Portal or run sp_set_firewall_rule on the master database to create a firewall rule for this IP address or address range. It may take up to five minutes for this change to take effect.
By Default, All Azure Resources can Connect to Your Database
By default, all Azure resources can connect to your server and databases hosted on Azure:
Allowing All Azure Services to Connect to Your Server is a Huge Security Hole!
If you “Allow access to Azure Services” set to On, you create a huge security hole for your server and every database in it. Not only can all your resources connect to your databases, Any Azure resource from any organization can connect to your database.
This setting is NOT restricted to the Azure resources in your subscription. It’d be nice to restrict permissions to the current subscription or list of subscriptions but that’s not possible. It’s everything on all of Microsoft Azure or you need to specify each IP address.
Turn Off Permissions to All Azure Services
Set the permissions to OFF to disallow all Azure services to connect to your SQL server:
Explicitly Specify the IP Addresses Allowed
To avoid the ability of rogue Azure resources from breaching your database security, you need to manually specify the IP Address of every resource that may connect to your server and databases. This can be a real pain.
Total Access Detective finds differences between Microsoft Access databases and objects. Updates for Total Access Detective are available for Microsoft Access 2016, 2013, 2010 and 2007.
Enhancements:
Improved SQL string comparisons for saved queries and properties like RecordSource and RowSource.
Trailing blank spaces and extra blank lines are removed before comparing them, this avoids flagging SQL string differences that do not affect functionality.
Query comparison. Under Data Options, if the query option is set to First Field Unique, it was always treating them sequentially and stopped on the first difference. This is fixed and works correctly.
Table macro comparison supports table names with apostrophe (‘) in the them.
Text comparison. If the VBA option is not selected, the results do not show the the Procedure tabs.
Database comparison results: The database name goes across the entire top of the form rather than being truncated.
Give your users the ability to add text with different fonts, point sizes, fonts styles (bold, italics, underline, etc.), bullet points, tabs, paragraph margins, indentations, alignment, spacing between paragraphs, color, graphics, hyperlinks, etc .
For no additional cost, email aliases can be created and assigned to a mailbox. For instance, sales@domain.com and support@domain.com could be aliases assigned to specific people’s accounts. That makes it easy to maintain a general address that’s assigned to whomever is currently responsible for it.
