Archives for posts with tag: Microsoft Access

The Making of Office 2010 is a series of videos that takes you behind the scenes with those who are responsible for creating Microsoft Office 2010.  This is Abigail Welborn, she is a software Development Engineer with Microsoft Access.  She talks about the features she worked on with Access 2010 primarily the Calculated Field.

Today’s guest is Jeff Conrad, co-author of the book, Access 2007 Inside Out, and a tester on the Access Services team. During this episode, Jeff talks about his upcoming book, Access 2010 Inside Out, discusses how he built a completely web-based restaurant management system using Access, and walks us through the system’s features, including data macros, custom reports, filtering, and client functionality.

Meet Malori! Malori is a paralegal in Microsoft’s legal department. She manages patent applications and assigns them out to attorneys and portfolio managers as well as other paralegals. Malori was looking for a way to make her team more efficient by presenting all of the information they needed in a single web page or application. Our team jumped in and made an Access Services solution, which allows her to manage all the data and provide custom views to her teammates. Today this web database is used by over 80 attorneys working on different cases at Microsoft.

 

In today’s episode, Malori shares her experience with Access Services and how it has helped her be more efficient.

 

Learn more about Access 2010 on the team blog.

Today’s guest is DJ Cole, architect and primary developer of SharePoint connectivity performance improvements on the Access development team. DJ dropped by to talk about how Access 2010 connects to SharePoint, and to discuss the work necessary for improving client-side performance.

As with most performance work, beauty is in the eye of the user. When users work against a server on the other side of the world, performance makes a difference. Data, after all, only travels as fast as the speed of light. Our goal for Access 2010 was to make the connections to SharePoint lists nearly as fast as local tables. Additionally, we had to ensure requests didn’t swamp the server, bottleneck throughout the network, or cause the client machine’s CPU or RAM to thrash. We found that caching data in local tables, combined with conservative usage of resources on the server, network and local machine, provided the best user experience.

This Access 2010 performance improvement builds upon the Access 2007 architecture. Read more…

For additional information about the latest release, check out the Access 2010 Intro series on the Access team blog.

Microsoft has an internal classified ads Web site that allows employees to buy and sell stuff—think of it as a company Craigslist. Barath Balasubramanian a tester on the Access team decided to recreate the app using Access 2010. I asked Barath to join us on The Access Show for a little show and tell. He plans to share it on Office Online once we ship Access 2010 (it will automatically show up inside the Access’ BackStage New page). In the meantime Barath has shared a beta  copy on UtterAccess.

 

Hopefully, it inspires some of you with new ideas for the contest.

In this episode, Kerry Westphal explains how to use the IsClient() expression to branch your logic depending on whether the form is running in the client or on the Web. In this way, Web forms can take advantage of the client richness, while also bringing the same form to the browser. She walks through an example of how to use the expression to run the client macro SaveAsOutlookContact from a Web form.

 

For more information check out the Access 2010 Intro series at the Access team blog.

This is the first episode of The Access Show with Ryan McMinn and Clint Covington. They have a big announcement for us—Access Services is new functionality as part of SharePoint 2010 that allows users to create new databases with forms and reports that run in the browser. Ryan takes us through a quick tour of the new Access design tools to create a donor tracking app and publishes it to Access Services and SharePoint.  Check out the Access 2010 Intro series at the Access team blog.