Ever wonder what changed between your database versions or the difference between two similar objects or tables? Total Access Detective is the premier program to detect differences between Microsoft Access databases, objects, code, and data.
Available as a Microsoft Access add-in, Total Access Detective lets you easily find differences between objects in your currently opened database. Easily find changes in your table and field definitions, object properties, controls, report sections, embedded macros, regular macros, modules, and data. The results are available to you in reports and on screen which can be copied or exported.
You can also compare any two databases to easily find exactly how they changed. Your databases can be an ACCDB, MDB or ADP database format. The new version lets you create separate databases for each comparison so you can easily manage multiple databases and changes over time.
We’ve added many new features to make Total Access Detective more powerful than ever.
Manually comparing databases for design and data differences is prone to error. Discover why so many Microsoft Access professionals rely on Total Access Detective to improve their productivity by quickly identifying the changes in their work.
Our long time client Kathy Korman Frey, George Washington University School of Business professor and GWU Entrepreneur in Residence, has engaged the FMS Professional Solutions Group again to update her HotMommas Project case study competition website and create another brand new website. Professor Frey has amassed the world’s largest public domain collection of women’s case studies, and created an environment where these women can share their experiences and challenges of creating and running companies along with juggling family and other commitments in life.
This effort is almost complete and we’ll be unveiling the revamped case study competition website as well as the new “sister” site next month. Stay tuned!
One of the challenges most organizations face is how to coordinate communications and tasks among team members and external contacts. With multiple people and clients/projects, emails fly in many directions. People with vital information may be unreachable while customers may be providing information to someone in your organization while others who need that information are oblivious. When someone leaves a team or organization, much of their information is lost.
Over the years, we’ve helped several clients better manage their emails and treat them like a database. We’ve built solutions that work with Exchange and Outlook to automatically classify contacts, tag emails, and store the information in a Microsoft SQL Server database. The data is presented through a Microsoft Outlook add-in showing all communications with a contact’s firm when you create or respond to an email. The data can also be displayed in the Facebook like interface to make it easy for everyone on your team to know what’s going on.
There’s no longer a need to look in someone else’s Inbox since information is immediately shared between everyone who needs to know (even before the recipient opens their message). Searching for messages is quick and easy, and corporate document retention policies can be enforced.
To learn more about this and other innovative activities of our Professional Solutions Group, please contact our consulting team.
Our Professional Solutions Group has helped organizations run Microsoft Access application over the web and can even help you use host RemoteApp instances for your users. Contact our consulting team for more information.
Total Access Startup lets you centrally manage and guarantee that all your users always launch the right version of Microsoft Access with the right version of your MS Access database (ACCDB, MDB, or ADP). Simply distribute a shortcut to your users to start your application. When you post an updated database, your users automatically get it installed on their machine the next time they launch your program. They don’t need to know the name of the database. You manage all of that in one place and can change it at any time. A runtime version lets you control the Access version launched for users not on your network.
Total Access Startup 2010 is now shipping. It supports both 32 and 64 bit versions of Microsoft Access 2010 letting you control which version your application requires. It also supports all legacy versions of Microsoft Access. Learn more about the new features and try out the free trial version.
I had the privilege and honor to be one of 18 small business owners from across the country to participate in the Senate Finance Committee’s Small Business Roundtable yesterday.
Convened by the senior tax policy advisors of the Senate Finance Committee’s two chairmen, Senators Max Baucus (D-Montana) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), it was their desire to learn how tax policy helps, hurts, and influences small business owners.
The meeting was held in the Dirksen building of the Finance Committee room with the big elevated dais under the Senate seal. We were sitting around a rectangular set of tables on the floor of the chamber with the staffers on one side and the business owners around the other three.
Rather than politicians, these were the senior staffers of the Senators and were the people actually responsible for understanding the issues and writing the legislation that gets passed.
Unlike the political rancor by their bosses the last few months, these people from both parties were sincerely interested in crafting legislation that would benefit small businesses. After all, every politician has small business constituents, and wants to help us create more jobs. They were also delighted to hear our perspective which is very different from the interests of large and multinational businesses that dominate lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill.
Led by Holly Porter and Jim Lyons, we discussed how tax policies impact our businesses and what we would like to change. The meeting lasted for three hours and was very interesting. It was a nice cross-section of American businesses. The 18 businesses came from 11 states. Among us, three were technology firms, there were a few manufacturing companies, retailers, industrial services, and professional services firms. Most of the firms, like FMS, have been around for decades.
Because of the diversity, different businesses wanted and needed different types of tax legislation, but overall there was general agreement:
Business owners are too busy trying to generate revenue and deliver services to focus too much on tax policy and special credits or incentives.
The tax code is too complicated and no one understands what’s in it. Our accountants file our taxes and whatever benefits or credits exist, we may capture them if we’re lucky, but well after the decisions were made. As a group, we’d prefer lower tax rates with fewer deductions.
The cost of compliance is too high and too complicated. Personally, I’d like to see a national sales tax and never have to file a tax return again. After all, companies use government services even if they don’t make a profit — or a profit in the United States. Just dreaming here….
The incentives added to the tax code get changed so often that they are hard to know and use. There were requests to have whatever policies implemented to be permanent or at least have a three-year life so that people can understand and actually make decisions to use them. The staff immediately mentioned this wasn’t possible because today’s Congress can’t constitutionally obligate a future Congress. Hopefully they’ll recognize the maybe you have it or maybe you don’t legislation doesn’t help businesses with long-term planning.
Due to significant changes in income or losses from year to year, and investment/sales cycles that don’t fit neatly in a fiscal year, it would be desirable to average income across multiple years. That would be fairer and more aligned to long-term growth in a progressive tax system that assumes relatively level annual incomes.
For more asset intensive businesses, the small business rules (Section 179) for immediate expensing of equipment that would otherwise be depreciated is important for cash flow and creating jobs. For those who aren’t familiar with this, when businesses purchase certain “long-life” equipment, the amount paid can’t be immediately deducted from income and have to be deducted and depreciated over time. The problem is that the company has to pay taxes on income which doesn’t deduct all the money spent on the equipment. Basically, you have to pay taxes on income that was never received. Section 179 helps with that. While in our firm, hardware is a small portion of our expenses so the impact is minimal either way, in manufacturing, it’s often critical. Personally, I’ve always hated the idea of paying taxes on money that wasn’t received even though you make it up in the following years. Just seems unfair when one is investing in the future of our people and company.
Finally, there was a sense that no matter what legislation is passed, the big multi-national corporations are the primary beneficiaries of all the deductions with their teams of lawyers and accountants. And that small businesses end up footing the bill. Why should we pay higher taxes than General Electric? Far better to reduce the complexity and deductions, and give us a lower tax rate. There was also a general sense that large companies aren’t paying their fair share, shipping jobs overseas, and not investing in the local economies. One gentleman suggested that there should be preferential capital gains tax rates for investments directly in real businesses versus financial speculation on the stock markets. Makes sense to me.
They asked us if there was anything they could do with tax law to directly decrease unemployment and we didn’t offer many suggestions. In fact, the feedback was overwhelmingly negative on some of the attempts to improve employment such as the HIRE Act and reducing employee FICA taxes. They were considered to have zero impact on any hiring decisions. The consensus was that we need increased demand for our products and services, and that we’ll create jobs if we see opportunities to increase profits. Unfortunately, that may beyond the power of tax legislation. Anything they can do to reduce the complexity of compliance and tax rates would be welcome.
Overall, it was a great experience to meet the people who craft the legislation we live under, and help them better understand what really impacts our businesses. I’m glad to see they reached out to small business owners and hope they’ll do what they can to help us remain competitive and successful.
Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint 2010 have a new feature that allows you to recover unsaved documents, even ones that you never saved. This expands on the Autosave feature that was available for years, but unlike earlier versions of MS Office, the automated backups are not deleted when you close your Office host. Additionally, multiple versions of your file are maintained, so that you can return to an earlier version of your document.
Microsoft Office 2010 has a new feature that makes it easier than ever to insert screenshots into your documents. The Screenshot feature is available in MS Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word 2010. On the Insert tab of the Ribbon, just click “Screenshot” and choose any of the windows that you have open.
A new feature in Microsoft Excel 2010 lets you insert tiny charts, or Sparklines, into worksheet cells. Sparklines are a powerful way to show a quick snapshot of data trends.
To insert a Sparkline:
Select the cell where you want to insert the mini chart.
On the Insert tab of the Ribbon, choose the desired Sparkline type in the Sparklines group:
We've enhanced our 
Over the years, we’ve helped several clients better manage their emails and treat them like a database. We’ve built solutions that work with Exchange and Outlook to automatically classify contacts, tag emails, and store the information in a Microsoft SQL Server database. The data is presented through a Microsoft Outlook add-in showing all communications with a contact’s firm when you create or respond to an email. The data can also be displayed in the Facebook like interface to make it easy for everyone on your team to know what’s going on.
Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint 2010 have a new feature that allows you to recover unsaved documents, even ones that you never saved. This expands on the Autosave feature that was available for years, but unlike earlier versions of MS Office, the automated backups are not deleted when you close your Office host. Additionally, multiple versions of your file are maintained, so that you can return to an earlier version of your document.
A new feature in Microsoft Excel 2010 lets you insert tiny charts, or Sparklines, into worksheet cells. Sparklines are a powerful way to show a quick snapshot of data trends.