OfficeTipsAndMethods

Posts Tagged ‘Access’

As a design principle, I apply a naming convention when creating new database objects. For example, field names begin with a lowercase letter. Recently, I was putting together a small application in Access 2010 beta so that  I could gain a little familiarity with the new Access version that will be released later this year. In a weak moment, I accidentally named some of the fields in a new table with uppercase first letters.

In the grand scheme of things, this is not a particularly serious problem but inconsistently formed names lend an unprofessional look to an application. When I tried to correct the names I discovered an inconvenient quirk. After replacing the first letter of each field name with its lowercase equivalent, saving and closing the table and then re-opening it again in design view, I found that the first letter of each field name had changed back to uppercase.

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the lower-case letter to ‘stick.’ That’s when I turned to my favourite forum for help. Thanks to UtterAccess VIP member (and Access MVP) datAdrenaline, I quickly had a reasonably workable solution.

Quote of the Day

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people who are convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another.

- Ellen Goodman

All I had to do is change the first letter of each field name I wanted to modify, save and close the table, re-open the table and replace whatever I had entered as the first letter of the temporary field name back to the lowercase letter with which I wanted to start the name. Step by step this is the method I applied:

• open the table in design view
• pre-fix each field name with a single letter
• delete and replace the original uppercased letter
• save and close the table
• reopen the table in design view
• remove the leading character for each field to correct name
• save and close the table

This problem occurred specifically in Access 2010 beta so it may be a non-issue when the new version is released but if you run into similar situations perhaps a similar approach will help you out of a bind “when all else fails.”

New articles in Access Wiki

Links

CamelCase

Access: What is it?

Big news last evening from the Office 2010 Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering Blog: in the two weeks since the public release of the Office 2010 beta more than a million people have downloaded it. There is a lot of excitement out there about this new Office release. See for yourself by downloading your own copy from http://www.microsoft.com/2010/ Remember, however, that this is a beta release so follow the installation instructions carefully

This article, John R. Durant’s WebLog : Why VBA Still Makes Sense , presents a solid case  for why VBA is the ‘next level’ when it comes to application development in Access and other members of the Office suite. John provides an excellent of VBA since its early days to the present and on into Office 2010 including his perspective on the ‘fit’ between .NET and VBA. John R. Durant’s WebLog : Why VBA Still Makes Sense is definitely a worthwhile read.

Ryan McMinn and Clint Covington demonstrate the most significant new Access feature being introduced in the 2010 version View the Office Team Blog Article and click the link to their video .