Access Cookbook

What We Left Out

To keep this book to a reasonable length, we have made some assumptions about your skills. First and foremost, we take it for granted that you are interested in using Microsoft Access and are willing to research the basics in other resources. This isn’t a reference manual or a “getting started” book, so we assume you have access to that information elsewhere. We expect that you’ve dabbled in creating Access objects (tables, queries, forms, reports, and pages) and that you’ve at least considered working with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications, the programming language included with Access). We encourage you to look in other resources for answers to routine questions, such as “What does this Option Explicit statement do?”

To get you started, though, following are basic instructions for what you’ll need in order to use the solutions in this book. For example, you’ll encounter requests to “create a new event procedure.” Rather than including specific steps for doing this in each case, we have gathered the most common techniques you’ll need into this section. For each technique we’ve included a help topic name from the Access online help, so you can get more information. The procedures here are not the only way to get the desired results, but rather are single methods for achieving the required goals.

How Do I Set Control Properties?

In the steps for many of the solutions in this book, you’ll be asked to assign properties to objects on forms or reports. This is a basic ...