Access™ 2007 VBA Bible: For Data-Centric Microsoft® Office Applications

Chapter 4. Organizing and Communicating with Outlook

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating Outlook appointments and tasks from Access data

• Writing Access data to the Outlook Journal

• Creating emails to contacts in an Access table

Outlook is the Office component that is used for communicating via email, maintaining a calendar, and storing contact and task information. For email and appointments (a set of appointments in a folder is called a calendar), the Outlook interface is so superior that I recommend not trying to replicate its functionality in Access, but instead to export Access data to Outlook, creating email messages, appointments, or other Outlook items as needed.

Way back in Access 2.0, I created a database to manage tasks, allowing me to assign them priorities, start and due dates, and notes, and order them by any of those priorities or dates. Of course, when Outlook was introduced in Office 97, my Tasks database was no longer needed, because Outlook includes its own Task List (or To Do List, as it is labeled in Office 2007). All the features I wanted were built in to the Outlook Task List, so I moved all my tasks to Outlook and managed them with Outlook's tools. Because Outlook does such a good job with tasks, there is no need to store task data in Access, though in some special circumstances you might need to do this, and then perhaps export the data to Outlook.

Outlook's rarely used Journal component, which records the creation of selected Outlook items, as well as user-entered items, ...