Microsoft® Access® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

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Data Macros in Access 2010

New to Access 2010, Data Macros are macros that allow the developer to apply macros to table-level events. Several different types of Data Macros exist and creating them is somewhat different than traditional macros. Now that you're familiar with some of the more advanced features of macros in Access, this lesson discusses Data Macros and how they can be created and applied to your applications.

LESSON SETUP

The only requirement to this lesson is that you understand how to use and create macros in Access 2010, as discussed in the previous lessons. Otherwise, this lesson does not require any other specific knowledge of Access.

THE THEORY OF DATA MACROS

The purpose of the Data Macro feature is to provide a macro that takes a user-defined action before or after an event occurs on the table. Because Data Macros are applied to table-level events, they are often compared to SQL triggers. Data Macros are different from standard Macro objects and embedded macros, because they provide only a limited set of macro actions.

In addition to being simply called from table events, Data Macros can also be called by name from the RunDataMacro macro action, which was added as part of the Access 2010 release. Although the number of table events available prohibits me from discussing each one individually, it is important to understand how these Data Macros work with these events and how Data Macro actions can be applied to these events.

EVENTS FOR DATA MACROS

As mentioned, ...