Welcome To Tips-FX - Edition 2
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Tips-FX is a email newsletter that focus on providing tips, help and information for skilled Microsoft Access users and related software disciplines.

Features

Office/Access 2000 installations issues
Simple Year 2K checklist
Making the data in graphs your own
Data Mining - Reading Material
Links, Articles online etc.


Verify Changes To Records

The following vb will allow you to confirm changes to records on your forms

Private Sub Form_BeforeUpdate(Cancel As Integer)
' Confirm with user that this record is to be modified

Dim updRecord As Byte

updRecord = MsgBox("Confirm Amounts record change", _
vbOKCancel, "Record Modification")

If updRecord = vbCancel Then

Cancel = True

End If

End Sub

http://www.gr-fx.com/toolshed/99_accvb/confirmrecordchanges.htm



Access Graphs - Change The Underlying Data Of The Charts

When you run the access chart wizard to create a graph in a form, you will find that the base data that makes up the form is not the data that you originally specified for the chart. Instead it is some trial data with totals for fields such as East, West, North.

If you want to add your own data to the design view of the graph, try the following steps.

First make a demonstration graph in a form using
Forms .. New .. Chart Wizard

Open the query / table that you wish to see in the graph.

Click in the top left hand corner of the data grid to select all the rows. Copy the rows to clipboard (Control C)

Now open the graph in in edit mode and select the datasheet behind the graph.

Click in the top left hand corner of the datasheet grid to select all the data in the chart

Paste the rows you selected before into the graph (Control V)

Now your graph should have your own data embedded in it.

Note: This is the only way to get the stock market graphs to work.

Our Consolidation Access Wizard Now Does Charts

Try our revised freeware Access wizard for preparing consolidation queries and then displaying them as graphs in Excel. Download it from

http://www.gr-fx.com/wizards/


Office 2000 - Access 2000 - Office 2000 - Access 2000

If you are going to install Office 2000 and want to keep your old versions of office on the computer you must do the following

1) Make sure that you select custom install
2) Install Office 2000 in a different directory than the previous versions of Office
3) After selecting the products that you want, there is a dialog box that lists the programs that will be updated. You must check the box "Keep these programs"

More on these issues at
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_3476.html


Now for GR's thoughts on installation of Office Premium

I followed all the above but at no stage did I come across a prompt that said custom install. I definitely did tick the keep these programs option box. When you get to the
page that has the Almighty Install now option at the bottom of the screen, you get the list of all the programs that are going to be installed. Now I only wanted to install
Access 2000 and Graph so I had to select "Not Available" to not install the other programs. A bit of a confusing selection choice to not install a software object.

Also there is an option box for Choosing IE5, Outlook Express and a few other internet tools. You can opt out of this

Switching Between 97 and 2000

Swapping between versions of Access is a bit better this time especially because the mdb file type *.MDB defaults to the last version of Access that you were using. ie Access 97 or Access 2000. I found the best way to switch between the two programs was to add a SendTo option in File Explorer to point to both programs.


Office 2000 Graph Upgrade Bug Is Back

When you upgrade to Office 2000 but still want to keep your older versions of Access ticking along, there is a really major bug if you use graphs in your forms or reports. Basically the Access 2000 conversion gets rid of your old version of graph and installs the new one. You can find out if you have this problem by opening a form in Access 97 that has a graph in it. Switch to design view and edit the graph. Your Graph8 object will now become a Graph9 object and will not be readable on any office 97 computer. By the way do not save this form.

Now to fix it, follow these steps.

To fix, Choose Start .. Settings .. Control Panel .. add remove programs

Open .. Microsoft Office and select "Not Available"  for Graph.

Now reinstall Office 97 to add the old version of Graph back again. Whilst this seems a little painful, it was nothing compared to trying to run Access 95 and 97 graphs
on the same computer.

An alternative would be to not install graph when you start. It is a default installation.

Package And Deployment Horror Story

The following notes are direct from the Microsoft Vault.  If you send out run time kits of your software, think  twice about the upgrade unless you send out CD's and your customers will be happy to upgrade to IE5 !!!

Issues when using the Package and Deployment Wizard to Create Access Runtime Applications

Large Distribution Sets
Distribution sets created with the Package and Deployment wizard that include the Access Runtime will be greater than 160 megabytes.

Internet Explorer 5.0
Microsoft Access 2000 is reliant upon technology available in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0. For instance, in order to distribute and use data pages, the workstation must have Internet Explorer 5.0 or later. Internet Explorer 5.0 will not become the default browser unless a previous version of Internet Explorer was present on the workstation.

Multiple Restarts on Target Machines
If a user installs an application created by the Package and Deployment wizard that contains the Access 2000 Runtime files and the workstation does not have
Internet Explorer 5.0 or Office 2000 already installed, the computer will be restarted two times during the installation process.

Read More At

http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153,1015270,00.html


Help Files In Access 2000

Your old help files may not work (they didn't in our shareware program graf-fx.mdb Initially it looked as if it was to do with the new html help and after reading the help chapter in
the developer edition, I was even more confused than when I try to program my video. Then I lucked out.

Before I referenced my help file called grafhelp.hlp in my forms as

grafhelp

What I actually need to do was to complete the file name

grafhelp.hlp

Thats it. Now the 4.1 help files work again.


Microsoft Upgrade Newsgroup

If you want to checkout all the latest on Access 2000 upgrade issues, head to

http://support.microsoft.com/support/news/Ngresults.asp?D=acc

and select the conversion newsgroup.

Year 2000

As time is quickly approaching, here are some things that you should definitely verify in your databases.

. Look very closely at all import and export processes. Any date fields that are imported could very well be 2 digit as Access defaults to 2 digits.

. Open all you tables and manually sort the data fields from
highest to lowest and lowest to highest ignoring nulls. If
you have any wacky dates, you may need to change some software.

Service Pack 1 For 98 Issues

By Owen Jenkins

The Office Service Release 1 patch contains a number of  useful updates for the original Office 97 suite. If you try to run SR1 on a computer with Windows 98 installed, the SR1
may appear to install correctly, but when you look in the About box of any Office application, the SR1 code does not appear and none of the updates are functional. This happens because SR1 is unable to update any files which have been ‘aligned by Windows 98’. There is a newer version of the SR1 patch which corrects this problem and works will all versions of Windows. This can be downloaded from

http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/Articles/sr1international.htm

For more information see Knowledge Base article Q184083
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q184/0/83.asp

If you have a recent version of Office 97 or have installed SR2, this may not be relevant to you.

Why not try out Owen's web site at

Healthbase.com.au

where you will find some handy Access utilities and also some information on his companies Health Related software for Access.

Sydney VB Users Groups

There is now a new user group for VB nutters.

http://www.aeronaut.com.au/SVBUG


Explore Your Data

Microsoft have now entered the data mining arena officially with support in Office 2000 for data cubes and more advanced pivot tables and graphs to take advantage of those cubes. There is also changes to to SQL Server to support server data cubes. This may
be one of the hidden features of Office 2000. Read about it at The Informant's web site

http://www.msOfficePRO.com/features/1999/07/vba199907dk_f/vba199907dk_f.asp

Not to be outdone by Microsoft, I have written all about how you can use MS Access filters to explore your data.  This article was also published in The Informant.

http://www.gr-fx.com/toolshed/99docs/drilldownfilters.htm

Or why not read about how you can use our shareware product graf-fx to explore your data.

http://www.gr-fx.com/toolshed/98docs/datamining.htm

This was published in the best Access magazine on the planet

Smart Access from Pinnacle www.pinpub.com/access/


Popular Pages On Our Site

http://www.gr-fx.com/toolshed/99_accvb/listboxmulti.htm

discusses how to select multiple entries in a list box and then use them in your application

Good Reading

You can download the first version of Active Web Developer from Pinnacle Publishing for free in PDF format by clicking on "sample issue". Lots of solid ASP reading and a couple of
the articles are about Access.

http://www.pinpub.com/awd/home.htm


Top Sites

Access Sites

http://home.att.net/~dashish/bugs/

http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm

or just try our toolshed

http://www.gr-fx.com/toolshed/tips-fx.htm


For Active Server Pages articles

http://www.15seconds.com/

For Visual Basic Resources

http://www.vbresourceguide.com/



New Versions

A new version of our data mining shareware Graf-FX is now available for download from

http://www.vb123.com/graf/

The new version features wizards for starting your data mining more efficiently, setting up better grouping queries and generating filters for restricting your data. We have also jazzed up other parts of the program.


Thanks for reading our newsletter.

Feel free to make comments, copy the email to a friend
or maybe even contribute to the next edition.


Garry Robinson - Software Consultant

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