Access Cookbook

Preface

What This Book Is About

This is an idea book. It’s a compendium of solutions and suggestions devoted to making your work with Microsoft Access more productive. If you’re using Access and you aspire to create database applications that are more than wizard-created clones of every other database application, this is the book for you.

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a book that shows you how to create a form, or how to write your first Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) function, or how to use the Crosstab Query Wizard, this may not be the book you need. For those kinds of things, we recommend one of the many Access books geared toward the first-time user.

Promotes Creative Use of the Product

Rather than rehashing the manuals, Access Cookbook offers you solutions to problems you may have already encountered, have yet to encounter, or perhaps have never even considered. Some of the issues discussed in this book are in direct response to questions posted in the Microsoft Access newsgroups online (at news://msnews.microsoft.com); others are problems we’ve encountered while developing our own applications. In any case, our goal is to show you how to push the edges of the product, making it do things you might not even have thought possible.

For example, you’ll learn how to create a query that joins tables based on some condition besides equality, how to size a form’s controls to match the form’s size, how to store and retrieve the locations and sizes of forms from session ...