Access 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference

Introduction

Welcome to the Access 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference. We wrote this book for Access users and programmers who want to increase the power of Access by adding the VBA (Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications) language. Access is Microsoft's leading consumer relational database management system for desktop applications. It's so popular because it's relatively easy to learn and very powerful. With wizards and detailed help files, users can easily create tables, queries, forms, and reports after only a brief introduction.

To utilize the power of Microsoft Access more effectively, you can add VBA code to your Access databases. By using VBA code, you can respond to application-level events, display forms and reports, manipulate toolbars, and even launch external applications or control certain aspects of Windows.

The Evolution of Access and VBA

Microsoft Access has had a rich history. Version 1.0 was the initial version of Access that ran on Windows 3.1. It was very quickly replaced by Version 1.1, which added a few new features and fixed many of the bugs introduced in the initial version. At this point in the history of Access, no one really took Access seriously as a database; it was buggy, there were a number of limitations in its feature set, and the database community just hadn't accepted that Microsoft could produce a quality database product.

In 1994, the first real version of Access was released: Access 2.0. Many database programmers using other software, such ...