07/11/07

Samples, Examples, and Information

Microsoft Access database is a popular product for end users who want to get useful work done with an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use software tool. The learning curve is shallow as novice and casual end users progress to become power users, taking advantage of more and more of the capabilities of the product. Finally, Access is a software tool of choice for database developers who need a capable database product that can develop desktop databases, multi-user database applications on local area networks (LAN), and client applications (the user interface) for server databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and others.

This site has information at different levels of Access use and is intended to be used in conjunction with other Access resources. It's not a point of contact for free, remote Access consultation, so please extend the courtesy of asking any questions you have about the information here in an appropriate Access newsgroup, such as the unsponsored Access newsgroup, comp.databases.ms-access. There are also several Microsoft-sponsored newsgroups dealing with Access -- their names start with "microsoft.public.access..." The author of most of the information you'll find here participates in the sponsored and unsponsored newsgroups.

All the information herein is provided, without warranty or representation of any kind, for the sole purpose of illustrating certain methods of using features and functions of the Microsoft Access database software. Any other use is at the sole discretion and the sole risk of the user. It may not function as you expect, or may not function at all in your environment.

You'll find that a good deal of information about Access also applies to the separate application development product, Visual Basic (VB). That is because the dynamic load library for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the programming language of Access and other Microsoft Office software, is also the core language of classic Visual Basic, that is, Visual Basic through Version 6. (The new VB.NET is much different than classic VB, and you'll find little, if anything, on that subject here.)

Updated workaround in the article on linking tables -- 12/14/03!