Access Hacks: Tips & Tools for Wrangling Your Data

by Ken Bluttman

As part of the Microsoft Office suite, Access has become the industry's leading desktop database management program for organizing, accessing, and sharing information. But taking advantage of this product to build increasingly complex Access applications requires something more than your typical how-to book. What it calls for is Access Hacks from O'Reilly. This valuable guide provides direct, hands-on solutions that can help relieve the frustrations...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596009240
• ISBN13: 9780596009243
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 351 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Access Hacks - Rocks!

I've only had this book a short time and have found more useful tips in this short book than in most of my other reference books. If you are proficient in Access, This is a must have!

Grab bag of handy tips and tricks

This is a fine set of 100 tips and tricks that will help you get the most out of Access. It's a good combination of simple tricks, and more advanced coding hacks. Involving everything for networks, to XML, to data crunching ideas. Even if you don't find exactly what you are looking for in terms of a solution you will benefit from seeing how the author approaches the problems. Look through the table of contents, if you find ten or twenty that are in your areas of Access pain then

Excellent Case Studies

As a database analyst for a large company, I oftentimes am confronted with small scale problems in Access. As always, there are a dozen different ways to solve them. Since I'm not 50 years old chock full of years of experience, the hacks here have saved me plenty of times. Once you read through it, you'll know when to apply the hack to a real world problem at work. The way I try to solve problems is by not re-inventing the wheel and rather referencing an example with a given solution. This is where the real value of the book lies. For example, a while back I had to automate a mass email using Outlook and Excel. I created a simple VB.NET app using COM to interface the two. One of the hacks in this book shows you how to automate the task using a given Access database of emails to create an object of an Outlook instance. You create an email object, set its properties (recipient, body, title, attachment, ...) and send it. This is a much more manageable solution I wish I had thought about.

Pick it Up, You Find Something Useful

The O'Reilly "Hacks" books are great, all of them. They each contain 100 hints and tips that intermediate to advanced users will find very useful. In fact, I don't believe that it's possible to pick up the book and not find something that you wish you had known earlier when you were working on some project. This is not a book for beginners. It presumes that you have and have used Access. To get full advantage of the book, you also need to have at least a little bit of experience with Visual Basic. It is also not a beginner's level introduction to SQL, the language of databases that Access speaks. It talks about SQL in some of the hacks, but again the concept is something you should know. Having said all this, the intermediate/advanced user will find this book to be absolutely filled with good information. The only complaints I have are that the book isn't big enough. I'd like to see a little more on SQL, and the differences between The Access version of SQL and the other versions that are out there. Also, I'd like to see some information about using Access with it's alternative back end database engine -- MSDE. Microsoft included this with Access. Which engine should I use, why? Mr. O'Reilly, maybe this should be the idea behind a new book on Access.

Just What Every Access Enthusiast Needs

Here is another useful book in the Hack series, chock full of good how-to-do-its, and right to the point. No fluff here, just find a hack that sounds appealing and see how it works. Mr. Bluttman has good insight to what makes database development more productive. Many of the hacks in this book are immediately useful in the business world like using a Confidential watermark, or having a way to randomly sort records, or even how to creatively sort the data in the lists. Don't miss the goodies either- putting web browsers on Access forms, and creating your own custom formatting. And much more. I highly recommend this book to Access users or developers at all levels.