Luke Chung, President and founder of FMS, Inc. was invited to be on Executive Leaders Radio airing Saturday at 10:00a.m. EST. Executive Leaders Radio with Host Dean Schwartz, Partner, Stradley Ronan, conducts “elite interviews” of prominent CEOs, COOs, CFOs, CIOs and Presidents focusing on “what makes people tick.” The Washington DC CEO Show can be found on terrestrial radio stations WHFS/1580AM (The Big Talker).
Get a FREE copy of the Microsoft Access Small Business Solutions book by Teresa Henning, Truitt Bradly, Larry Linson, Leigh Purvis, Brent Spaulding with the foreword written by FMS president Luke Chung (a $50 value)
Thanks to a special arrangement with Theresa Henning and the publisher we are pleased to offer a limited quantity of this book for free to purchasers of any of our product suites. This book contains descriptions and code for a wide range of challenges small business and workgroups face.
*NOTE* Thank you for your interest. This offer is no longer available.
Last week we moved our offices. We’re in the same building and went from suite 600 to suite 1150. Although, it was a change of only five floors, the view from our new office is quite a spectacular change. From simply overlooking Tysons Corner mall, our new office provide a panorama to the NorthEast, letting us see all the way from northern Washington DC (we can see National Cathedral) to the Maryland skyline of Bethesda to Rockville. Sorry for any delays during the chaos. We look forward to serving you from our new office. Please update your records with our new address!
Here are directions if you want to visit including interactive maps from Microsoft Bing and Google: Our Location
We are very pleased to announce Total Access Statistics for Microsoft Access 2010 is now shipping, along with updates for earlier versions of Access. Total Access Statistics is the most popular data analysis program for Microsoft Access. It extends the data analysis capabilities of Access queries to let you perform advanced numerical analysis on your data. Use any Access table, linked table, or query to perform calculations such as percentiles, regressions, frequency distributions, t-Tests, correlations, non-parametrics, rankings, moving averages, etc. It can also perform data normalization and let you select random records. As you would expect in a query, you can specify Group By fields so analysis is performed on each set of records with identical group fields.
Total Access Statistics runs within Access with all output in Access tables. It supports MDB, ACCDB, and ADP databases.
In addition to supporting Access 2010, we’ve added Financial Calculations for Cash Flows. It now calculates net present value (NPV), present value (PV), future value (FV), internal rate of return (IRR), and modified internal rates of return (MIRR). There’s support for both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Access 2010. It includes both the interactive wizard that runs as an add-in, plus the programmatic VBA library so you can embed statistical analysis in your applications.
Here is additional information for:
Free demo versions are also available for you to download.
We at FMS are very excited about cloud computing and started developing solutions using Microsoft Azure including SQL Azure well before it was released to the general public. We feel cloud computing represents the next big platform change in the software industry and the most significant transformation since the introduction of the Internet in the mid-1990’s. It will transform the internal hardware, application hosting, and data storage business the same way electric companies eliminated most organization’s need to generate their own electricity.
While there’s been lots of discussions of Azure with .NET and SQL Server, we also see lots of opportunities with Azure and the Microsoft Access/Excel/Office community. In fact, we’re busily working on a way to integrate Access data and files with the cloud. Meanwhile, we’d like to share some tips and techniques for linking Access databases directly to tables in SQL Azure. This opens up huge new opportunities to create and deploy Access databases using a more robust, cheaper, and highly scalable platform that is enterprise quality.
I look forward to your feedback on two new papers:
I spent the 4th of July watching the fireworks in DC next to the Lincoln Memorial. It's always a wonderful experience to do that beyond the basic joy of watching cool explosions. Sitting by the reflecting pool with friends and family let us reflect on what a wonderful nation and concepts our founding fathers created by prioritizing the freedom of the individual.
Over the past few months, I've had the fortune of participating in our democratic system much more than usual.
I was recently appointed to the Fairfax County Information Technology Policy Advisory Committee (ITPAC) on behalf of the school board, which is giving me insight into the challenges our county and all local municipalities face with providing services to its citizens. Some of the problems are quite fascinating and complex. I've only been to one meeting and we won't meet until after the summer, so we'll see what comes of it.
Late last month, I was invited to participate in a lobbying effort on Capitol Hill as part of the Association for Competitive Technology. I did this twice almost 10 years ago, so it's been quite a while. ACT gives small technology businesses a voice amid the battle among the large players, and brought in participants from across the country for a one day blitz. It turns out that we as a group are very under-represented on the Hill and were warmly received at all the offices we visited. All elected officials want to support small business owners in their districts, but don't seem to meet them too often on the hill. I was very pleased to participate in small group meetings and had a chance to meet my Senator Mark Warner (D-VA, very impressive as he really understands the technology industry) and Congressman Moran (D-VA). We also met the legislative aides for Sen. Hatch (R-UT), Congressman Connolly (D-VA) and Wittman (R-VA), and Speaker Pelosi (D-CA). Unlike the others, the speaker's office is in the Capitol building and was an interesting maze to get to both physically and through security.
The general message was to make sure they considered the impact of their decisions on small businesses and how unintended consequences of their decisions may impact us. Whether it's regulating the internet, net neutrality, cloud computing, privacy, international laws, taxation, patents, etc., a lot of issues affect small technology businesses. Considering the impact of small business on employment in this country, it's critical that they don't create more problems than they solve.
I don't know how much of an impact we had, but it was gratifying to walk the halls of Congress and see how they operate. There are a lot of challenges facing our country and world. Technology holds the promise that it can help us increase our productivity and ability to address those needs in a meaningful way at a reasonable cost. I hope they continue to foster an environment that allows technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship to prosper for the common good.
In our Microsoft Access, VBA, and VB6 programs, we often need to pause processing for a certain period of time, or until a specific time, and then continue processing. One common way to do this is to use the DoEvents function in a loop while waiting, however, this method consumes the CPU time and slows down the PC considerably. This is a significant problem when pausing for more than a couple of seconds, when users will notice the slow down. Use the Sleep command instead.
This is available in our Total Visual SourceBook!
Microsoft Access, VBA, and VB6 include a wide range of built-in Date functions, including DateAdd, which calculates the difference between two dates. A common need, however, is to add a number of weekdays to a date, without counting weekend dates.
Learn about this and all our royalty-free module code in Total Visual SourceBook where you can also perform business day math with a list of holidays to avoid.
One of the nicest features to add to an address data entry screen is to automatically fill the city and state fields when a zip code is entered. In conjunction with the US Postal Service, FMS offers the Total Zip Code Database which gives you the entire list of valid zip codes and their corresponding city and state names. Both the primary and secondary city names are provided. Speed up data entry, eliminate typos, and clean up existing data with Total Zip Code Database. We also include the list of common city names the USPS doesn’t like with their corresponding corrections. The database is provided on an annual subscription basis with an initial list and 11 monthly updates.
In addition to the information provided by the USPS, the Total Zip Code Database also includes geospatial coordinates (latitude and longitude) for each zip code. We also provide a list of countries and states to simplify lookups, and module code and sample form to add this to your applications. The data is provided in a Microsoft Access MDB and ASCII files.
For more information, visit the Total Zip Code Database page, view the zip code flier, or try the free trial.
We are pleased to release a FREE preview version of Total Access Admin 2010 for your review. Total Access Admin lets you monitor Access databases in real time. Select any Access Jet database (MDB or ACCDB) across your network to view and log users as they enter and exit your database. It's particularly useful for documenting suspect connections that could be the source of database corruption. You can also perform a variety of tasks such as locking new users from opening your database, compacting the database after everyone has exited, etc. The existing version supports Access 2007 and earlier. This new version support Access 2010 for both 32 and 64 bit formats, along with databases from earlier version of MS Access. For more information and download instructions, visit Total Access Admin 2010 Preview.