When designing an application and its tables, it's very important to capture the time dimension and determine how data should be stored with the expectation that it will change over time. While there's a natural tendency to keep data normalized so that the same information is stored in only one place, the time dimension also needs to be considered.

• What Needs to be Preserved Over Time?
• Making Sure Data Normalization Doesn't Lose Historical Data
• Shadow Tables

For more details, read our paper: Microsoft Access Database Architecture: Taking Time into Account and Shadow Tables

Additional papers and resources in our Microsoft Access Developer and VBA Programming Help Center

FMS developer Molly Pell is is a guest blogger on the Microsoft Access developer blog. This post demonstrates a neat trick that you can use to filter a Continuous or Split form while your users are typing in a Combo Box.

Check out the post here: Using a Combo Box to Search as you Type

Read our new paper on:

Microsoft Access Database Architecture: Storing Temporary Data and User Settings

There are many things a user does with an application that need to be preserved either during processing, between screens, between sessions, or between application updates/versions. When designing a system, it's important to consider what needs to be kept and where/how to do this. If designed properly, the data should also support multi-user environments.

Problem

Users are commonly annoyed to be forced to re-enter their last specifications when the application should start with that as its default. After all, a computer is supposed to be good at remembering things, right?

Solutions

There are several ways to preserve user information during a session, on a PC, and/or between PCs:

• Keeping Selections in Memory for the Current Session
• Using the Registry to Store User Information Between Sessions
• Using Private Tables to Store Information Between Sessions
• Making Sure Previous Values Remain Valid

Read the paper for more details and tips.

Microsoft's SkyDrive service has offered everyone a free 25GB hard disk in the cloud. This lets you store your files, backups, and even share files with others. It's an amazing free offer that we've mentioned in the past.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has just reduced the free amount to 7 GB. That's still generous, is more than Apple's iCloud, and is what's offered to new customers. For a limited time, any registered SkyDrive user *who has uploaded files to SkyDrive* as of April 22nd can opt in to keep 25GB of free storage while still getting all of the benefits of the new service

So, if you already have a SkyDrive account, they are letting you keep your 25GB disk but you need to claim it. Simply log into your SkyDrive account at skydrive.com with your Microsoft's Windows Live credentials. On the bottom left of your account page, and click on the "Manage Storage" link. You'll see a listing of storage plans, and under "SkyDrive Free" a button that says "Free upgrade!"

Just click it and you should see this: 

Additional Resources

• Here's specific information on the upgrade from Microsoft's SkyDrive team.
• Not familiar with SkyDrive? In addition to being a hard disk in the sky, SkyDrive also has software you can install on your device (PC, Mac, mobile) and keep folders in sync. Here's an overview of the new features from CBS Moneywatch: Microsoft gets cloud storage right with new SkyDrive
• For a more detailed description and video of how it's used, see Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky explain the exciting new features and vision:
  Making personal cloud storage for Windows available anywhere, with the new SkyDrive

Choosing Between Spreadsheets and Databases

We are often asked by Microsoft Office power users whether, why, and when they should use Microsoft Access versus Microsoft Excel. Especially when they are very comfortable using MS Excel and don't understand the reasons why anyone would use MS Access or databases. We've written a new paper that describes the issues in detail:

• How Microsoft Access and Excel Empower Information Workers
• Advantages of Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets
• Disadvantages of Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets
• Advantages of Microsoft Access and Databases
• Disadvantages of Microsoft Access
• How they Should Work Together

Paper: Microsoft Access versus Microsoft Excel for Data Analysis and Reporting (Spreadsheets vs. Databases)

Software System to Manage Impact Aid Suvey Forms for Department of Education Funding

See how our Microsoft Access database application is helping the Washington DC Public System (DCPS) more efficiently and accurately secure their Impact Aid funding from the US Department of Education.

What is Federal Impact Aid for Primary and Secondary Education?

Many local school districts across the United States include within their boundaries parcels of land that are owned by the Federal Government or that have been removed from the local tax rolls by the Federal Government, including Indian lands. These school districts face special challenges — they must provide a quality education to the children living on the Indian and other Federal lands and meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, while sometimes operating with less local revenue than is available to other school districts, because the Federal property is exempt from local property taxes.

The Impact Aid law (now Title VIII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) has been amended numerous times since its inception in 1950. The program continues, however, to support local school districts with concentrations of children who reside on Indian lands, military bases, low-rent housing properties, and other Federal properties, or who have parents in the uniformed services or employed on eligible Federal properties. The law refers to local school districts as local educational agencies, or LEAs.

To secure this funding, school districts send survey forms to their students' parents, collect the results, and submit the claim to the Department of Education.

Helping the Washington DC Public School System Process their Federal Impact Aid Survey Forms and Secure Funding

As you can imagine, the federal government has a lot of workers and property in Washington, DC that don't pay local property taxes to fund education.

The Washington DC Public Schools (DCPS) consists of over 100 public elementary and secondary schools and learning centers. Each year DCPS sends out survey forms to determine the residential and parental employment status of their students. This information is used to determine Impact Aid funding for students who live or have parents who work on federal property.

Database Software Solution

By automating a process that was previously performed manually, FMS helped DCPS achieve increased efficiency and accuracy with an easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy, and easy-to-support, multiuser Microsoft Access application.

Professionally designed and deployed, FMS created reports and processes to help DCPS identify a larger number of federally connected families, and file the forms to obtain federal funding.

Results

The application increased funding which more than paid for our services and allows DCPS to devote more resources to their classrooms. The payoff will continue year after year.

Let us know if your school systems could benefit from claiming these Impact Aid funds with our database application.

Related Information

• Impact Aid Survey Form Database Software from FMS
• Additional Education Software Solutions from FMS
• US Department of Education Impact Aid page
• Fairfax County Public School System (FCPS) Teacher Performance Evaluation Task Force
• Contact Us for More Info

Microsoft Access Database Documentation and Analysis

300 Ways To Create Better Microsoft Access Applications

FMS is pleased to announce Total Access Analyzer 2010 is now shipping with support for both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Microsoft Access 2010. Total Access Analyzer is the world's most popular Microsoft Access product winning every Best Access Add-in Award since 1994. This is the tenth major release of Total Access Analyzer since its debut in 1992.

Comprehensive Microsoft Access Database Documentation

Total Access Analyzer examines each Microsoft Access database to provide detailed documentation of individual objects and their relationships to each other. Comprehensive code analysis of VBA module code and macros is also performed. A powerful search features lets you find any string across all the properties, macros, and modules. Over 375 presentation quality reports are available with a wide variety of customization, sorting, and filtering options.

Avoid Crashes Before You Ship

The popularity of Total Access Analyzer is its ability to help Access users and developers improve their applications, avoid errors that can cause their solutions to crash, and learn best practices to increase their skills. By using Total Access Analyzer to take over an existing application, during development, and before deployment as part of one's quality assurance process, developers can avoid embarrassing mistakes and improve consistency and performance.

Most importantly, Total Access Analyzer detects 300 ways to avoid errors, apply best practices, and improve performance. By leveraging our years of experience and customer feedback, FMS has created the most powerful system for diagnosing Microsoft Access applications. For instance, Total Access Analyzer can detect broken references to tables, fields, forms, reports, macros, and VBA code that will cause the database to crash as soon as they're encountered. It finds unused objects (tables, queries, forms, and reports), macros, classes, procedures, variables, constants, etc. to help developers get rid of unnecessary and old work.

Advanced analysis is also performed to detect inconsistent field definitions across tables, duplicate SQL definitions, macro command problems, etc. Multi-level object and code relationships are presented with three advanced hierarchical diagrams showing application flow, data flow, and object containership.

Microsoft Access users, developers, and consultants of all levels rely on Total Access Analyzer to deliver great solutions. "Total Access Analyzer is an amazing product that I’ve relied on and recommended for years," said Sal Ricciardi Programming Writer for Microsoft Corporation. "It’s a huge time saver."

New Features and Support for Microsoft Access 2010

Total Access Analyzer 2010 adds many enhancements in addition to supporting both 32 and 64 bit versions of Microsoft Access 2010. Its VBA module code parser now supports the conditional compiler syntax (e.g. #If VBA7 Then) that's common for supporting 32 and 64 bit environments. There's advanced macro documentation and analysis that includes a "macro compiler" to validate if macro commands have the proper number of parameters. Improved views and reports simplify the review and printouts of macro lines scattered in embedded macros across the forms and reports. New temporary variable analysis documents and detects undefined and unused TempVars set by macros and modules. A variety of other new suggestions were added to detect timer event inconsistencies, query performance enhancement opportunities, and reserved word conflicts with the upcoming SQL Server 2012. With all the new features, Total Access Analyzer remains the most powerful diagnostic tool for Microsoft Access databases.

"Total Access Analyzer provides the comprehensive documentation and analysis that empowers Access users and developers to takeover existing Access applications and enhance them," said Luke Chung, President and founder of FMS. "Total Access Analyzer offers a cost-effective way to understand what's going on in a database, detect errors, improve quality, and learn Best Practices. It should be part of the quality assurance process during development and certainly before shipping. If it doesn't pass Total Access Analyzer's review, it's not ready for deployment. It's fundamental to our own Access development efforts."

Availability and Pricing

Total Access Analyzer 2010 is available immediately from FMS for $299. Existing owners of Total Access Analyzer can upgrade for only $199. Total Access Analyzer is available via ESD and also comes with a professionally printed user manual and CD. 

Official Press Release

When working with ComboBoxes and ListBoxes, we often find the need to select the first item in the list by default. This can be done when the form loads, or when the rowsource values of the ListBox or ComboBox are changed.

We've written a new paper containing an explanation and sample database of how to do this with the ItemData(0) property.

Our example database contains a form with a ComboBox containing ProductCategoties, and a ListBox containing Products.

When the form loads, it selects the first Category in the list. When the Category is changed, the Products list is updated, and the first product is selected.

To learn more, read our tip on Microsoft Access Forms: Selecting the First Item in a ComboBox or ListBox and download our sample database. 

In Microsoft Access, a common need is to have multiple combo boxes or list boxes on a form, and to have the selection in one combo box limit the choices in a second combo box or listbox. For example, consider an Address form containing State and City lookups. When you select a state, you want the list of cities list to be limited the selected state.

This is known as cascading combo boxes or synchronized combo boxes. 

We recently posted a tip and demo database containing a sample of species, both plants and animals, categorized by their taxonomic rank (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, and genus). When you select the value "Animal" from the Kingdom combo box, the Phylum combo box is updated to only show Animal phylum. The Species list box is also filtered by your selection.

To learn more, read our Microsoft Access Cascading Combo Boxes tip and download our sample database demonstrating how to create cascading combo boxes and list boxes. 

Longtime client Kathy Korman Frey, George Washington University School of Business professor and GWU Entrepreneur in Residence, has engaged the FMS Professional Solutions Group to enhance her HotMommas Project website.

The site is the world's largest collection of public case studies for entrepreneurial women. It is a community where women can learn from the experiences of other women addressing their businesses, family and personal challenges.

The revamped website is built on Visual Studio .NET, SQL Server with a modern, dynamic interface incorporating our technical and graphic artist resources.

Contact us if we can help you with a similar solution.

Access 2010 Programmer's Reference (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

by Teresa Hennig, Rob Cooper, Geoffrey Griffith, and Jerry Dennison

Written by our long-time friends who are Microsoft MVPs and members of the Microsoft Access development team, Teresa Hennig, Rob Cooper, Geoffrey Griffith and Jerry Dennison wrote Microsoft Access 2010 Programmer's Reference, which also applies to Microsoft Access 2007.

Thanks to a special arrangement with the authors and their publisher, Wrox, we are pleased to offer a limited quantity of this book for FREE to purchasers of any of our Access product suites. A $45 value.

Simply purchase one of these suites:

• Total Access Developer Suite
• Total Access Ultimate Suite
• Total Visual Developer Suite

and click here to add it to your cart, or mention this offer when ordering.

Terms and Conditions plus more information

Yesterday, FMS President Luke Chung was invited by the governor's office to participate in his proclamation of 2012 as the Year of the Entrepreneur. Luke stood behind Governor Bob McDonnell and Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling during the press conference and participated in a day-long event supporting entrepreneurship, small businesses, and job creation.

Commerce Secretary James Cheng led the events. Participants were able to hear from successful Virginia business founders and learn from each other through a luncheon and Entrepreneurial Town Hall. Examples of agricultural, technology, manufacturing, and craft businesses showed the diversity of Virginia firms offering products and services for in-state, national and international customers. It was also interesting to trace the roots of the founding of Virginia in 1607 as a high-risk entrepreneurial enterprise that eventually led to success after many failures.

All parties recognized the value and responsibility of seasoned entrepreneurs helping newer entrepreneurs, and how fundamental this was to the success of our state and nation. Activities will occur around the commonwealth over the year where government representatives and entrepreneurs share their ideas, experiences, and resources. Already recognized as one of the most business friendly states in the country with one of the lowest unemployment rates, Virginia continues to foster business success in a bipartisan manner.

Noteworthy was the inclusion of Education Secretary Laura Fornash in the activities stressing the importance of public education as part of a healthy business climate. This includes having great K-12 education and the many higher education institutions across Virginia. Those institutions attract bright students from outside Virginia, create entrepreneurial opportunities around them, and give us the ability to keep them in Virginia for life. FMS and Luke Chung are honored to be a part of this initiative.

For more information visit:

• Year of the Entrepreneur web site
• NBC TV News Coverage
• Press Conference Video
• Press Release

LinkedIn offers many opportunities for professionals to interact with each other. There are many groups available for the Microsoft Access, Azure, SQL Server, and Visual Studio .NET communities. Here are some of the vibrant groups we've discovered:

Microsoft Access, Excel and VBA

• Professional Microsoft Access Developers' Network (PMADN)
• Access and VBA
• Access Developers Network
• Excel and VBA Users

Microsoft Azure and SQL Server

• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Windows Azure and Office 365

Visual Studio .NET

• C# Developers/Architects
• VB DotNet Coder
• VB.Net Professionals

Data normalization is fundamental to database design. Properly normalized data makes it easy to support an application over time and simplifies the querying, displaying, and reporting features of an application. 

Unfortunately, we don't always receive or have normalized data. Tables that require adding fields as the data changes over time are particularly problematic and violate the basic premise of database design where adding records is free, but adding fields is expensive:

Here are some updated resources detailing the value of data normalization, including a sample database and VBA code to transpose and normalize your existing data.

• Transposing Data in Microsoft Access Tables
• Microsoft Access and SQL Server Database Normalization Tips
• Transposing Non-Normalized Tables with Total Access Statistics

These and other related papers are part of our developer centers:

• Microsoft Access Developer Help Center
• Microsoft Access Query Help Center

Hope these help you create more scalable, maintainable, and analyzable databases.

For advanced data analysis, check out our Total Access Statistics add-in product.

The Microsoft Access 2010 version of Total Access Analyzer is close to shipping and we are pleased to offer a FREE preview for you to try it.

Total Access Analyzer is the most popular Microsoft Access add-in and the winner of every Best Microsoft Access Add-in award ever. With Total Access Analyzer, you can truly understand what's going on in your database. Generate comprehensive documentation of all your database objects, get detailed table and field lists, module code printouts, form and report blueprints, and much more. Get detailed cross-references for how objects are linked to each other so you know exactly where each table, query, form, report, macro and module procedure is used. The Application Flow, Data Flow, and Object Flow Diagrams show how code and objects flow across your entire application. Over 300 professional quality and customizable reports are available.

Almost 300 types of issues are uncovered to pinpoint errors, suggest design improvement, and recommend performance tips. Find unused objects, missing field references, unused code and many other things that should be fixed before you deploy your applications. Many of the tips are recommended Best Practices for Access development, so you'll learn how the pros improve their design and development techniques.

We've added many new features to support Access 2010, generate more useful documentation, identify more errors, and suggest more design improvements and best practices. We've also improved the user experience with the ability to open a cross-referenced item in design mode while viewing the information, previewing multiple reports at once, and adding color to all reports. Here is a description of new features.

Take this opportunity to learn what Total Access Analyzer can do for you. See how it documents your databases and identifies errors and opportunities for improving them at the object and code levels. Discover why so many Access users and professionals rely on the program to deliver and create more robust solutions.

The preview version is available for immediate download and is fully functional. It expires on March 15, 2012.