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Garry Robinson
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Welcome To Tips-FX - Edition
8See all newsletters
Tips-FX is a email newsletter that provides free tips, help and information for skilled Microsoft Access users and related software disciplines.
In this edition
Access Reports - No Data
Search For Text Anywhere In A Database
A Tool To View Images Quickly
Time Is Ticking Down To Windows 2000
Windows Quick Tips
Under 18 ?
Combo Boxes That Look To Themselves For Inspiration
Updates To Ie5
Winner Of The Sweep
Yahoo Without Pictures
Good Reading And Useful Sites
Our Software And Resources
During the month, Tips-FX subscribers reached 500. Thanks
to everyone that has joined the list this year... ED
------------------------------------------
ACCESS REPORTS - NO DATA
Have you ever opened a a report only to be frustrated that
there is no data in it. Well all you have to do is open the
report in design mode, view the code behind the report and
copy this code into it
Private Sub Report_NoData(Cancel As Integer)
MsgBox "No information has been posted. ", vbInformation, "Report is
cancelled"
Cancel = True
End Sub
This small piece of code is a special report event that occurs
when no rows of data are displayed in the report.
------------------------------------------
SEARCH FOR TEXT ANYWHERE IN A DATABASE - VISUAL BASIC
Thanks to Internet search engines, users are now starting to
insist on tools that will interrogate the text in databases
and retrieve information that relates to that text. This
article outlines a simple tool that builds SQL statements that
search any table in a "back-end" database. The sample application
is geared for Access/Jet databases but could easily be modified
for other databases. The software is provided as a Visual
Basic project but has some good example code on how to interrogate
the Table and Query objects in an Access database. Read it here
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/periodic/period99/html/10vbd/vb99j21.htm
See figure 1 which shows you the VB utility.
http://www.vb123.com/toolshed/99_vb/dbsearch1.gif
This article in Pinnacle's Visual Basic Developer at
http://www.pinpub.com/vbd but was selected as an MSDN feature
articles. To read more articles at Microsoft, click on the
mysterious "TOC" icon at the top of this page to see a index of
all articles from many magazines. By the way TOC means table
of contents. Obvious !!!
------------------------------------------
A TOOL TO VIEW IMAGES
Scott McManus does another one of his reviews on some software
that allows you to view images as thumbnails and a few other
related goodies. Check out his new web site and article at
http://www.skandus.com/acdsee.htm
------------------------------------------
TIME IS TICKING DOWN TO WINDOWS 2000
Recently I received a promotional stop watch from Microsoft
so that I could COUNTDOWN to the release of this fabulous new
operating system (with 40 millions lines of code).
The stop watch was pretty good except for one thing. It beeped
on the hour. Now I searched my promotional material for
instructions on how to turn this off. Surprise, surprise,
lots of marketing material and no instructions. Hopefully
either I will learn how to program my watch or Microsoft will
send out more instructions when they send out Win 2000 !
On reflection, maybe I am meant to buy the book because I do
not think I could view an online web page on my stop watch.
------------------------------------------
WINDOWS QUICK TIPS
To Maximize a screen, double click on the top of the window frame.
To quickly close a window. Double click on the little image
in the top left corner of the window (or the cross in the right).
------------------------------------------
UNDER 18 ?
A job that I was working on lately required me to calculate whether
a person was under or over 18 and then apply a different charge to
that person on those results. This led to a function which I would
call in visual basic as follows
dim yesNoFlag as Boolean
yesNoFlag = under18(#22-nov-1981#, now())
....
The function is as follows.
Public Function under18(dateBorn As Variant, dateCheck As Variant) As Variant
Dim testDate As Date
If IsDate(dateBorn) And IsDate(dateCheck) Then
testDate = DateAdd("yyyy", -18, dateCheck)
under18 = testDate < dateBorn
Else
under18 = Null
End If
End Function
You can also use this function in a query if you want to.
------------------------------------------
COMBO BOXES THAT LOOK TO THEMSELVES FOR INSPIRATION
Have you ever used Excel and enjoyed the way that information
inside cells can autotype using examples from cells above.
Well you can do the same thing inside Access by writing a query
that shows unique examples from the same field from entries in
previous rows of data. To add a self lookup query for a combo
box, create a new table called MyData with one text field
called MyInfo.
Open the table and add a few text entries into the table. Open
the table in design view and select the MyInfo field.
Now click on the Lookup Tab at the bottom of the screen and
change the text field into a combo box control.
Now change the row source to the following query
"select distinct MyInfo from MyData order by MyInfo"
This query will select all the unique entries from the
MyInfo field and display them as a combo box in the field.
Now you will have an immediate lookup table for a field
without having the create a new lookup table. This is a
great time saver when you are still designing the
structure of a database and wish to have some simple
integrity in your data.
------------------------------------------
UPDATES TO IE 5
You can download updates to IE5 including some security patches. Also
included is a really neat utility to list links and images on the
current page. If you right click in the page you are on, it will
show you all the images on the page and tell you how long they would
take to download. Very useful to help speed up a web site. Apologies
to those of you how do not wish to use IE5.
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/
------------------------------------------
WINNER OF THE SWEEP
During the month, GR-FX had a complimentary Melbourne Cup horse
racing sweep for some its Australian clients and associates.
There was only a first prize and the winner was
Declan Bass from Prosoft who had "Rogan Josh"
Check out the simple GR-FX web site design at
http://www.prosoftdevelopment.com/
------------------------------------------
YAHOO WITHOUT PICTURES
The most popular search engine on the planet is Yahoo which
really is a directory service that combines searching into
its directory hierarchies. Well if you would like to try a
directory service without any advertisements, try
http://dmoz.org/
This is a directory service project which is now
being incorporated into Netscape, Lycos, HotBot amongst others.
Read more
http://dmoz.org/about.html
Or simply try out these programming directories
HTML, XML etc
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Data_Formats/Markup_Languages/
Visual Basic
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Visual_Basic/
Visual Basic For Applications
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/VBA/
Microsoft Access
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Databases/MS_Access/
Microsoft Excel
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Spreadsheets/Excel/
Microsoft Word
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Word_Processing/Word/
Java
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Java/
Perl
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Perl/
If you are running a Web Site, you should get your
site registered carefully at this site. If you need
something to do, signup as an editor.
----------------------------------------
GOOD READING AND USEFUL SITES
Great Active Server Pages site.
www.aspwatch.com
Create VBA Object Collections for Access
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/periodic/period99/html/aov9916.html
Excel Links
http://www.beyondtechnology.com/htm/rsrc_links.htm
Visual Basic
http://www.programmersheaven.com/links/link3.htm
Data Modelling
http://www.islandnet.com/~tmc/html/articles/datamodl.htm
Web Data Mining
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hearst/talks/data-mining-panel/
New Web Based SQL Server Tool For Office 2000
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19991019S0003
LAST EDITION
http://www.vb123.com/toolshed/news/issue7.htm
PREVIOUS GOOD READING LINKS
http://www.vb123.com/toolshed/news/read99.htm
-- OUR SOFTWARE AND RESOURCES -----------------------
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data mining shareware
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So thanks for reading our popular 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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