Microsoft® Access® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

49

Building Macros

Now that you're familiar with the different parts of macros in Access 2010, this lesson reviews building more complex, multi-step macros. Often, it is useful to build macros that execute more than just one macro action at a time and, as you'll see, building these steps is an art. As a macro performs more actions, the number of places the macro can fail increase exponentially, thus increasing the overall likelihood of your database application behaving in unexpected ways. These types of failures are often referred to as bugs in the application and programmers often take great care in preventing these sorts of problems from occurring. Learning how to properly handle problems that can occur will save both you and your application users a lot of time and frustration. This lesson discusses how to design multi-step macros, handle macro errors, and use logic branching and loops in macros to provide application functionality.

LESSON SETUP

The major requirement for understanding this lesson is that you should already be familiar with the basic parts of macros in Access 2010 and how to build them, as discussed in the previous lessons. Otherwise, this lesson does not require any other specific knowledge of Access 2010.

CREATING MULTI-STEP MACROS

Macro actions are really just granular operations that can be executed in a macro. In most cases it is desirable to put together several of these actions to build some operational logic into a database application. This concept ...