Just back from the UK Access User Group meeting. UKAUG . Great to have Armen Stein from J Street in Seattle over to talk to us again. We saw new charting facilities for Access 2016 and confirmation that Access 2019 would be released in the “fall” but Microsoft are keeping new developments quiet. We have had limited charting facilities in Access plus of course the ability to link and embed Excel charts for over 20 years but these are new to Access. Click the link below for more:
New Access charts
Access Web Apps are no more, of course, which is a shame. There are hardly any rapid application development (RAD) tools for the web and AWA promised to be one of the best. Maybe they should have been given a different name and a completely separate development team but at least desktop Access is alive and well and the developers are working on new features.

Just back from the UK Access User Group Seminar where I did a talk on User Login and Security. The simple Access demo I used and the accompanying notes can be downloaded and used freely from the Links page. Microsoft Access is a hidden gem. Many professional programmers who mainly use Visual Studio have no idea how powerful it is. With SQL Server as a backend you have the power to handle millions of transactions and dozens of users but the native Access database engine is very capable of handling smaller systems. Certainly it is a very rapid development tool but with the power of Visual Basic for Applications there’s very little it cannot handle. Now with Access Web Apps, it is going into the world of browsers and handheld devices and Access 2016 is on the way so hopefully the product will be around for many more years…if only more schools used it to teach database development.

For more details of the UK Access User Group see www.ukaug.co.uk

An unusual request from a customer using Sage 50. They want to add users who can view certain data (customers, suppliers, sales orders) but not make changes.

With applications I’ve written myself I could do this many ways, with some applications that let you edit the data-entry screens you could hide the Save button. No such feature within Sage so it’s down to giving them options.

1. Within Settings/Access Rights, only give the user access to menu options that are read-only, particularly Reports – so they can view, save or print customers details, orders, etc.

2. Use a third party program such as MS Access to create view screens. Pretty easy to do and can even be done with ODBC if you’re not a Developer – I’ve quoted them for it.

3. Third party add-ons such as those from Adept Software do roughly what they want. They are looking at the trial versions.

I’m now running Office 365, Exchange Online for email and the almost latest Android 4.4 on the mobiles. After years of making daily backups of Outlook with those vital diary entries and emails it’s now a few seconds between making an entry on the laptop or mobile until it pops up on the other so you know it’s out there in the cloud plus your offline copies are saved too. Not a good metaphor is it? – I want vital data to be stored in something more permanent than a cloud – but we’re stuck with it until the next buzzword…

Finally got round to redesigning our website using WordPress. I’ve done a few for others over the last few years, but customer projects have to take priority so the Christmas break was a good opportunity. This blog will be an opportunity to offer insights and real experiences of using and helping others with hardware and software, new and not so new.