Switching Access Versions

In the last newsletter, I discussed downsizing  problems Access 2010 to 2007 after finding out that the client was using Access 2007.  My golden rule for this now (after wasting a few hours) is to develop in 2007 all the time for clients that have 2007. Whilst I still prefer Access 2010, I will switch versions as required using my Access Workbench 10 product.  Here is a page that discusses switching with Workbench 10

We do what we do but is it enough ?

Every 6 months or so you should ask yourself, am I heading in the right direction with my job or am I just going where I want to go. If you are a software consultant, your clients will be your barometer. If your job mix consists of supporting lots of clients doing lots of different short jobs, changes will be gradual. If your job mix is one of 3 month contracts, a down period could easily drag on from a few weeks and turn into a few months.

My rule on managing this is simple, if you are making lots of dough, don't push extra hard, if you are not making much dough, work/train/learn/market yourself real hard till the money comes back. No paid work is not the time for golf and holidays, part timers generally become more part time than they want to be.

Peter Vogel discusses this in an editorial entitled  Is Programming Enough? back in 1997. 

Note: I loved reading Peter's editorial every month back in the good old days, I hope I can get you interested in the ones that are still relevant today in this newsletter.  Garry

The First Ever Edition of Smart Access - August 1993

In August of 1993, the first ever edition of Smart Access was written. This newsletter featured articles on Developing with Microsoft Access, the Reddick naming convention, ASCII text reporting and Soundex for more flexible text comparisons. Download and read it here Writers in this edition included Helen Feddema, Paul Litwin, Stan Leszysnky, Dave Browning and Gred Reddick

Facebook or Tweet or Forward Newsletter

Everywhere in the monster Smart Access inspired website, you will find the following F Share button at the bottom of each page. Click on this and you will share the page with your Facebook Pals. 

On my Blog which is where this newsletter comes from now, you will see twitter and facebook and RSS links.
http://vb123.blogspot.com/

In the newsletter you will see links to forward the newsletter to friends.  If you can all do this once, vb123.com will become more popular, a little more money will flow in and I will be able to pay for more organised content.  

Thanks  if you can do this, Garry Robinson, Editor of vb123.com

PDF: Simplifying Complex SQL by Peter Vogel

Access developers often find SQL bewildering: While simple things are easy in SQL, as you move up to more complicated problems, SQL statements can quickly become intimidating. Peter Vogel looks at some strategies for solving tough problems with SQL.

Read Peter's PDF article on queries

Backward Compatibility from Access 2010 to Access 2007

If you are creating an Access database using 2010 but your audience requires a solution that works in Access 2007, the best way to do this is to use Access 2007. Of course you will be like me this week and create the database using 2010 and add features that are not 2007 compatible. If you do that you will get a warning "Unrecognised database format".  That will excite you. So what have you possibly done wrong and what is the solution

You have added the Navigation Control
You have added a Data Macro
You have added a Calculated Column in a table
You have added a Web Browser control

This compatibility topic is discussed at Microsoft here

PDF: Flexible Normalisation and Denormalisation Helen's Way

Helen Feddema writes "A reader asked me how he could convert a table with more than 100 questionnaire fields to a more manageable format, with the fields converted to records in a table to make it easier to tabulate the data. Effectively, this is the reverse of Garry’s problem where the converted multiple records into one  Read the article in the pdf document here