Produced by Garry Robinson (known below as "Ed") from Sydney, Australia.

In this edition,
DUPLICATE DATA ENTRY FOR ACCESS
FMS BECOMES A SPONSOR
BIG BROTHER - OFFICE XP ACTIVATION WIZARD
REGIONAL DATE CHECKER
OUTLOOK/EXCHANGE LINKED TABLES
GOOD READING LINKS - BUMPER ACCESS MSDN LINKS
WRAPPING THIS EDITION UP

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DUPLICATE DATA ENTRY FOR ACCESS

In the January edition of Smart Access, Garry Robinson and Taha Kass-Hout discuss a system for undertaking duplicate data entry as a means of verifying data. This article requires $$$ to read. Free reading in January is an article on using XML in Access.

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FMS BECOMES A SPONSOR

This sponsorship comes with a catch. We will be reviewing the FMS products and if they have any flaws, you, the reader of Access Unlimited will find out about it !!! That should be fun.

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BIG BROTHER - OFFICE XP ACTIVATION WIZARD

Here are some brief notes on installation of Access/Office 2002/XP.

Internet Explorer was upgraded to version 5.5. No option to keep the old version is allowed.

There was a fatal error on installation when some DLL object was missing. Whilst this was distressing, Ed decided to use the new send a report error to Microsoft option that comes with Office XP. After reporting the error, a page from Microsoft popped up with a link to a possible solution. This second linked page actually told how to fix the problem. This leads to an important lesson with these error-reporting options in new Microsoft software that they can actually lead to a solution to the problem.

Important: Once again, if you intend keeping any of your old versions of Office, please use the CUSTOM INSTALLATION rather than accept the default installation options as these will wipe out your old software.

Once Office XP is installed, the Activation wizard will turn up the second time that you use an Office product. The following links show a couple of the pages that are displayed.

Generally as this is the second time that I have been through this process, I do not find the ownership checks at all invasive.  As for Access XP, my primary use for it at the moment is to continue development of Access 2000 databases. For this I actually enjoy the new interface far more than the old interface. Why ? Cause it looks a bit snappier. The good news is that the old databases seem to keep working as Access 2000 databases. This is a good feature for developers and for end users that are buying new licenses but need to run old databases. Do not throw away your old Access 2000 version as you will still need it for testing.

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TOOLSHED EXCLUSIVES - REGIONAL DATE CHECKER

Following on from last month, this section of the newsletter will feature code and objects that are only available to persons who purchase or upgrade The Toolshed. This month's exclusive download is a date test that you can add to the autoexec macro of any Access database or any form in an Access database. Scott McManus wrote this exclusive function.

This function tests the date format in the computer that is being used to see if the date format is actually the local regional format. In countries outside America, this can be a real pain if the computer is unknowingly running with a USA format because 1-June-2001 could be entered by the user as 1/6/01 and stored in the computer as 6-January-2001. This change to the date occurs after entry and is hard for the user to pickup. The following code illustrates the testing function in action.

' Test that the Australian short date setting is OK
If Not regionalDateCheck_FX("Australia") Then
  MsgBox "Problems with regional settings"
Else
  MsgBox "Simple Test passed OK"
End If

' Test that the Australian 4 digit years setting is OK
If Not regionalDateCheck_FX("Australia YYYY") Then
  MsgBox "Problems with regional YYYY settings"
Else
  MsgBox "Test passed OK"
End If

The alternative to this type of test is to setup the input mask on the date field as dd/mm/yyyy This works very well from a compliance point of view. The big problem here is that data entry and modification of dates is quite difficult when compared to entering dates into free format date fields. To find out more on how to retrieve this source code, click on the following link.

AND YET MORE ON DATES From Tim Schumacher

Hello Gary

I live in Christchurch, and I'm a newcomer to Access and Vb (but I've picked up a bit in the year I've been learning it).  I use A2000 and I've had problems with dates viz. our format "dd/mm/yy" vs. US format "mm/dd/yy".  SQL treats dates as US when they are before the 12th day of the month, but after the 12th accepts them in our format.

The way around it is to change all dates into US format with the following function...

Function USDate(X As Variant)

If Not IsDate(X) Then
  Exit Function
end if

USDate = Month(X) & "/" & Day(X) & "/" & Year(X)

End Function

I found this in a KB article using Advanced Google search. This is a pretty good to search the MS KB articles. I just add "kb" in the field and get google to search only the "microsoft.com" site.  The article was for <= A97 with (I imagine), the implication that the problem had been fixed in A2000. I vaguely recall that SP1 for Office2000 was supposed to fix the above. As I could not get SP1 to run, maybe that is the reason I'm having trouble with the dates. No need for an e-mail answer - I find your newsletter most interesting and the links are great.

Cheers Tim

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OUTLOOK/EXCHANGE LINKED TABLES

After upgrading to Outlook 2002, I eventually got around to re-exploring the Access to Outlook linkers. These seem to work the same for mail messages but here is an interesting loss of functionality with Access 2002. When you look at the Tasks folder in Access 2002, you only can read about 8 columns and none of them include the important Subject and Body fields. But when you use the Access 97 Outlook linker, you can view a lot more of the fields including Subject and Body. But unfortunately you cannot write to those fields.

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ANYONE WANT TO BUY AN INTERESTING DOMAIN NAME

Email Garry at access@gr-fx.com for more information.

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GOOD READING - MSDN ACCESS 2001 LINKS

Doug Thatcher brings you a whole list of links to a lot of material that has been published at MSDN during 2001. Hopefully you will enjoy some of these links.

Smart Access Articles Follow:

Inside Access Articles Follow:

MS Office Professional Articles Follow:

Access 2002 Specific Links:

More General Developer Topics :

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WRAPPING THIS EDITION UP - HAPPY NEW YEAR

Thanks to every one in 2001 who read this magazine and even more thanks to those programmers and power users who purchased Graf-FX or the popular Toolshed. After 29 editions of this magazine, it is only the fact that this magazine and vb123.com brings in custom development business and software sales that keeps it ticking along. Knowing how much work is required to make any headway, it is no wonder that so many good programmers websites have gone into decay. If you want to read more about tricks to make a successful website, read the appendix below. Have a successful year ...

Ed. Garry Robinson

APPENDIX 1 - GARRY TELLS A MARKETING STORY

THE INTERNET TRICK THAT WORKED FOR MY SHAREWARE - THE TRUST FACTOR

For the first 3 year that I was involved in promoting my data mining shareware through a variety of pretty cheap techniques such as posting to as many shareware download sites as possible, developing special html web pages to catch key words and the good old banner swap systems. Whilst these approaches brought in downloaders, they rarely brought sales. Then I came across an article that suggested that I was far better off developing good content than just trying to attract visitors. This luckily coincided with a fortunate break where I was invited to write for a computer magazine and suddenly I found that I was writing good content that ended up being posted on the web.

This new approach added a new approach that I didn't have in my arsenal before and that is TRUST. This is one of the big factors that will persuade a user of your software to part with some dollars. Twenty five computer articles later and whilst I am not a household name, my name is getting out there regularly and users drift into a web site full of content on quite a regular basis. They also started purchasing enough software to recoup my investment in development. Early this year I hit upon another winner when I decided to sell my software with complete source code at twice the price. This more than doubled the sales of the product.

I can only guess that adding the source code to the purchasing options allowed the end user to think that they could take the software where they wanted to go. But I also suspect that this approach also adds to the TRUST factor as well. So where does that leave the ordinary shareware developer that certainly hasn't got the time to develop a high content web site or ezine to support their product. Well here are my suggestions.

2) Tidy up your software with the features that you would expect in a software product. Ease of use, good interface and a jolly good help file.

3) Spend time promoting your software through writing for online magazines and posting online articles related to the product.

4) Try and coax user feed back in your product at all costs. And then set about implementing it. You will probably have to pay someone to do this for you as very few users will provide decent feedback for free.

5) Contemplate selling the source code for your product if you market to a knowledgeable market.

6) And good luck...