Access Cookbook - Ken Getz [3]
Chapter 4
This chapter is a compendium of tips and suggestions for making your application development go more smoothly, more professionally, and more internationally. Rather than focusing on specific topics, this chapter brings up a number of issues that many developers run across as they ready their applications for distribution. How do you build a list of objects? How do you make sure all your objects' settings are similar? How do you translate text in your application? How do you use the common Windows dialogs? All these questions, and more, make up this group of tips for the application developer.
Chapter 5
Many developers need to gain tight control over printed output, but earlier versions of Access made this quite difficult. Starting with Access 2002, you'll find direct support for selecting a specific printer device, changing print layout settings, and more. This chapter introduces the Printer object and its properties, allowing you to perform tricks that were difficult, if not impossible, in earlier versions. (Although many of the chapter databases will work in Access 2000, this chapter's examples will not. Because the functionality presented here was new in Access 2002, the samples simply won't do anything useful in Access 2000.)
Chapter 6
This chapter concentrates on working with data in ways that traditional database operations don't support. You'll learn how to filter your data, back it up, locate it on the filesystem, calculate a median, perform sound-alike searches, save housekeeping information, and more. Most examples in this chapter use some form of VBA, but they are clearly explained, and "testbed" applications are supplied to show you how each technique works.
Chapter 7
The solutions in this chapter cover some of the details of VBA that you might not find in the Access online help. We've included topics on several issues that plague many Access developers, from handling embedded quotes in strings and creating procedure stacks and code profilers, to programmatically filling list boxes, to working with objects and properties. We've included code to sort an array and solutions that combine several of the previous topics, such as filling a list box with a sorted list of filenames. If you're an intermediate VBA programmer, this chapter is a good place to expand your skills. If you're already an expert, this chapter can add some new tools to your toolbox.
Chapter 8
Access is a big application, and when designing applications you have a number of choices to make, each of which can affect the application's performance. Unless you're creating only the most trivial of applications, you'll have to spend some time optimizing your applications. This chapter's topics work through several different areas of optimization—steps you can take to make your databases work as smoothly as possible. The topics range from optimizing queries, forms, and VBA, to testing the speed of various optimization techniques, to accelerating client/server applications. If you want your applications to run as quickly as possible, this chapter is a good place to look for tips.
Chapter 9
This chapter presents a compendium of user interface tips and techniques. By implementing the ideas and techniques in this chapter, you'll be able to create a user interface that stands out and works well. You'll find some simple, but not obvious, techniques for controlling the Access environment, such as altering your global keyboard mappings as you move from one component of your application to another and creating forms that hide the menus and toolbars when they're active. The chapter shows how to create combo boxes that accept new entries and how to provide animated images on buttons. You'll also find useful tips on working with data on your forms, using an ActiveX control to improve your interface.
Chapter 10
Few modern database applications run on standalone