I’m now an United Nations Intern

If you’ve come here from Google and are looking for general UN Internship information, I’ve written up a post detailing some information about the selection process and what the internship is all about. View the UN Internship FAQ.

Annoying Australian allowed into the UN general assembly

It has been a hectic few days for me in the Big Apple. I’ve started my internship with the United Nations and I’m already in the thick of it. I’m working in Peacekeeping with some awesome people and I’m glad my meager skills can contribute to something that is of worldwide importance. I’m … Read the rest

Ever wanted to retreive the label information of a textbox control in Ms Access?

Been a while since I’ve written one of these things. Truth is, I haven’t been doing much Access databases in some time. However, I’m back in the fold, writing a small Access 2007 app and reacquianting myself with its nuances and idiosynchroses. In the process, I stumbled across a small little feature that, while obvious once you think about it, is not immediately apparent to the casual user.

Often on Access forms you’ll use a textbox control. Usually, unless you delete them, the textbox control comes with an associated label control. Lets call my example “txtGenericTextBox” with a label called … Read the rest

Troubleshooting Potential Errors when Using Transactions in Ms Access – Do NOT Close the Workspace!

I was doing some recordset juggling in vba and out of habit I usually close every object I open up explicit using the .close method on that object.

For example if I open up a database using something like this

Dim db as dao.database
Set db = currentDb

I will close it at the end of the function or procedure

Db.close
Set db = nothing

When using transactions, you make use of the workspace collection and you open it along the lines of

Dim myWrk as dao.workspace
Set myWrk = DBEngine.Workspaces(0)

As usual, I want to close this at the … Read the rest

DCount – “You canceled the Previous Operation” error

Really really quick tip

It seems that if you use dashes (-) in your field names for any table, and try to run functions on them in VBA like “DCount()”, you’ll keep encountering a Run-Time Error ‘2001’ “You canceled the previous operation”.

My recommendation: get rid of dashes and underscores in your table field names.

Edit: You will also get this error if you request incorrect fields names in the table. For instance, you are trying to ask for a count of customerIds and write the code as “DCount(“customerId”, “tblCustomers”)”, when the field in the actual table is ‘intCustomerId’ … Read the rest

A useful fashion to code multiple filters on an Access form

Programming an form filter in Ms Access is simple enough. Assume you have a combo box with two values – TRUE or FALSE – on some sort of boolean control. You want the filter to set this value to TRUE when the combo box reads TRUE, and vice versa. Usually you would simply put some code in the afterUpdate() event of the combo box which would read something like this:

sub cbxSomeBox_AfterUpdate()
dim strFilter as string
if me.cbxSomeBox.value “” then
strFilter = me.cbxSomeBox.value
me.filter = strFilter
me.filterOn = true
end if
end sub

This works fine if you simply have … Read the rest

Access Report Design – Cluttered Controls – Can Grow & Can Shrink

Here’s a quick tip with regards to report, and to a lesser extent, form design. Many times when you’re design Ms Access reports, often you will come across spatial problems, where you simply trying to fit too many controls (usually textboxes) on a report – even when you’re designing in landscape mode.

Two extremely handy TEXT-BOX properties are the CAN GROW and CAN SHRINK property. By setting these properties to YES on a text-box, these will tell a text book to grow and shrink vertically with regards to the the size of the data that they are displaying. This means … Read the rest