Ms Access – Cannot make MDE file error

Well, as usual, I published Access tips in response to problems that I come across, and get around, during my day-to-day Ms Access development.

As we know, Ms Access ain’t exactly the most stable product ever made and there are many bugs which often occur with badly explained non-sensical error messages.

Today, I kept getting an error that went something like “Cannot make MDE, ACCDE file”. This was strange. I could make the MDE about 5 minutes before I had made some minor edits to control names on a report. Why could it suddenley not make an MDE (with no … Read the rest

Quick Tip – Conditional Formatting on Ms Access Reports

This is one little annoying problem that there is not enough obvious documentation for within Ms Access 2007. While it might seem obvious enough, at the time, it wasn’t to me (so who is to blame, my lack of knowledge, the software interface, or the help documentation?).

I was developing a report in Ms Access and setting all these conditional formatting expressions and values. When I was running the reports, the formatting conditions were seemingly not working. I ran my mouse over some of the textboxes, and noticed that the background colour was changing as per my formatting rules when … Read the rest

Access 2007 After One Hour – Initial Highlights

I’ve been using Access 2007 for about an hour now, quickly developing a small database to store information on what periodicals I’ve been reading for my thesis, and when I have accessed them. Quick review – it is fairly impressive! Highlights are:

  • The Ribbon Gui common to all Office 2007 products is used very well in Access 2007
  • Graphical Calendar Lookup for Date Fields.
  • Split View Forms – Graphical Form at top, Datasheet at the bottom.
  • Ability to standardised formatting of controls on a form, meaning left, top, width and height values are consistent for groups of form controls! This
… Read the rest

Access 2003 – Importing Queries results in bad query aliasing.

This is a quick little tip.

I came across a minor annoyance the other day when I was importing Access saved queries from another database and using link tables. If you import your queries before you link your tables, then try run the queries with no tables link – Access will complain that it can’t find the tables, then litter your queries that use those linked tables with aliases like “expr1:” “expr2:” and so on. This means that if you use a lot of saved queries you’re going to waste valuable time fixing them all up.

The trick is very … Read the rest

Ms Access – The Upgrade

I’d never thought I’d ever say something so geeky but I must comment that I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited about downloading a product as I am right now. And right now I’m downloading Ms Access 2007. I’m taking advantage of the http://www.itsnotcheating.com.au offer, and buying the new version of Office 2007 Ultimate for $75. That is a bargain.

I’m presently doing a small bit of consulting work, developing in Access 2003, and have stumbled into a small problem. I have never worked with the Runtime version of Access, and now I’m being requested to deploy my … Read the rest

Ms Access – Percentage Field Formatting

A quick tip to fix what shouldn’t be a problem!

Occasionally, Access can act rather confusingly. I ran into a typical example early this morning, when I was trying to get Access to allow entry of percentages correctly. I’ve done this about one thousand times before and probably solved this problem one thousand times as well, but every time it happens it causes me to scratch my head (mostly in disbelief).

What happens is this: You set up a field in a table, designate it to be formatted as percentage. Right OK – you go to your form design, set … Read the rest