Tech Tips

If you are interested in keeping on top of MS Access and its road ahead, you might like to read this blog: 

http://blogs.msdn.com/access/

 I was looking for information on Access 2007 service packs, performance improvement, etc., and turned to the semi-official Microsoft Developer blog.  There is a posting from Bill Gates on the impetus to move Access functionality to the web with Sharepoint.  Looks like the authors post every week or so.

Last night I was as usual rushing to meet a deadline. I opened a document created previously, and then saved it with a new name, to use as a template. Tried to highlight some text to change, but horrors! Couldn't select any text. I tried doing the same thing in Excel, with no problem. Changed mice, no luck. Used the built in track pad, no luck. Turned to my best friend Google and found this, which worked fine, so I'm sharing it here too. One more place for the registry to gum things up, it turns out:  

Basecamp makes it very easy to add "companies" (other organizations) to a project, in additoini to your own company or organization.  And you can add as many users to each company for that project. And once you do that, you can then decide what level of access each of these additional company users should have. You can allow them to see and post messages, to-do's, and/or milestone events.  

This error can suddenly arise in a Microsoft Access database that has been in day to day use without problems for some time. This is a rare error in current versions of Microsoft Access, but began to appear in Access 2000.  

I'm addicted to Firefox's keyboard shortcuts. You can open a new window, enter the address of a website and close the window without moving your hands out of QWERTY position.  

Use Firefox smart keywords to make it easier to use your favorite search engines to find what you need faster.  Takes about a minute to add a web site to your Smart Keywords list, and then you have an easy way to search websites right from the browser Location bar (where you usually have to type the whole web address).  

Microsoft has released an update to Microsoft Office 2003, XP (2002) and 2000. With this update, you will have the ability to open, edit, save Office 2007 documents in their new format. This update will cover word processing, spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations.  

On this site and others, you have probably seen the small orange and white icon maybe along with words like “RSS feed.” RSS, or “really simple syndication,” gives users of the web a way to have news from your favorite sites delivered to you. You build up a list of the sites you care about in your news reader. Then, updates come to you in digest form, aggregated together. For the full story, you click on the link which takes you back to the original web page, blog entry, multimedia source or other web content.

Why would you use a news reader?  

There are some subtle new behaviors exhibited by Access 2007.  I will leave it to you to decide whether these are "bug" or "features." One is found when applying a filter to a form which has a child form embedded.   

Office 2007 utilizes yet another file format as its default, creating documents with the extension .docx in Word, .xlsx in Excel, etc.