THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I don’t know about your question specifically, because I don’t use Access, but there is no way to change the ribbon UI back to the old style.

Tango - I have Access 2007 showing a list of either queries or tables down the left side of the screen.  You have to cyle between queries and tables; it doesn’t show both at the same time.  If you right click on the query or table a pop up list appears that includes object properties.  Clicking on that brings another pop up where you can add information to a description field.

Right clicking the bar at the top of the list of queries or tables gives you a pop up that has both “sort by” and “search” functions.  So far I have not been able to figure out how to get it to search by key words in the object properies description field, but perhaps you already know how to get it to do that.

Since I don’t know what your screen looks like now, I am not sure how to get from where you are to where I am, but what I have now is not appreciably different from what I had with Access 2003.

Right, I have all that, except I cannot do a “sort by” description. 

Also, the number of entries you see, if you include the icon, is much smaller than the older version.

I do like that you can include both tables and queries in the same view.

If I use the list option I can see 33 tables or queries at the same time with a slider bar to view the rest. 

I still haven’t found a way to sort on the description.  However, you can manually create a custom group in the navigation pane and then add the tables or queries that you want to view together to the custom group.  Maybe not as convenient as a sort on description but functionally similar.

Peter: ah, now that’s nice.  That does allow me to put the same query or table into multiple custom groups?  If so, then very sweet.

Sorry, but no, this is no good.  I need to be able to order my views and tables.  I need the sequencing.  I know I’m one of the few who does views of views of views, but this is important to me.

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Also, there’s no reason that we can’t have the classic look as an option.  Right now, in Excel, it shows: Home/Insert/PageLayout/Formulas/Data/Review/View. 

Ugh.  Why can’t I have “File” as my first option, be able to create that, and put in all the open/save/print, etc that all other applications have?

There must be a way to add that in, but right now, I’m being lazy about trying to find it.  Until then, I’m doing the “show all commands” and adding the shortcut/favorites to the very top nav bar. 

They could have done something really good, but they blew it.

I’d also want to be able to export my configuration so that I can transport this to my home.

So far, big thumbs down.

Two more problems:

1. I used to be able to rename my queries (and tables), and if I had other queries accessing those objects, Access was smart enough to point to the renamed version.  Not any more.

2. I used to be able to copy/paste from Excel to Access.  Now it gives me some “damaged” error.  Instead, I copy to a text editor, and from there, I copy to Access, no problem.

Yech.

Are there no employees of Microsoft that is a reader of this blog that feels my pain?

1. I wonder if that is a setting you can control?  I’ve used Access 97 and 2003, and Access has never automatically updated references when a query name changed.

Perhaps, but I’ve used Access on multiple computers and have never had to do any personalized settings to make that happen.

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Why can’t MSFT offer the “classic” skins.  This is really a joke.  The transition from 1-2-3 to Excel was far easier than the transition from old MSFT to the newer and “better” MSFT.

Is there not some revolt site for Access and Excel users?

I hate Office 2007, and I also can’t stand Windows Vista. I will stick with my old version of Office 2002, and Windows XP.

Why not install an older version of Office on your computer at work? Talk with the persons who installed Office 2007 and see if they will let you do this. They should still have the activation codes lying around.

I am a heavy user of Access 2007 work as I was of Access 2003 before.  I have not noted any particular disadvantages to Access 2007, and like Rally, never had the automatic updated reference function that Tango described in my 2003 version.  I also have not noted any particular advantages to Access 2007 so there is no particular reason to update that I can see.

However, that is not true for Excel 2007 which offers much larger spreadsheet capacity than earlier versions.  Anyone who gets rid of the entire Office 2007 package will be losing the very valuable features of Excel 2007.

terps: I guess you are not part of corporate America.  There is one standard for the thousands of employees here.  They went through a huge rollout phase to get everyone to Office 2007.  It’s as simple as that.

As it stands, I am now delaying a good portion of my work until I get home, which is a killer for my time. 

Ironically, my company’s productivity will improve because they rolled out an inferior product.

I am not an Access user but I love Excel 2007. Unlimited rows and columns plus useful new functions like iferror, sumifs and countifs.

The nearly unlimited rows in Excel (up to 1,000,000 I think) was the main reason I downloaded a pirated copy of Office 2007. This was before I was comfortable using Access. Once I got better at using Access, there was no need for me to install the pirated version of Office 2007, since I didn’t need the extra data capacity. The pirated version did work by the way. I installed it on my sister’s computer. You have to love uTorrent and eMule.

Tango, I am sorry to here that the upgrade has eaten into your free-time.

Not being able to copy and paste data from Excel to Access is appearantly due to a faulty security patch (KB958437).

http://www.google.com/search?q=KB958437

Perhaps your I.T. guys can uninstall this patch.

Here is another workaround if your IT guys/gals aren’t willing to uninstall the update. Copy the data to the office clipboard. Close Excel and select Yes when prompted with this message:

“There is a large amount of information on the clipboard. Do you want to be able to paste this information into another program later?”

You should now be able to paste the data into your Access table.

http://www.fmsinc.com/MicrosoftAccess/Errors/ExcelPaste/Clipboard.html

1. I used to be able to rename my queries (and tables), and if I had other queries accessing those objects, Access was smart enough to point to the renamed version.  Not any more.

I believe this is a setting that you can control.  Open your database.  Make sure all queries and tables are closed.  Click the microsoft office button in the upper left hand corner.  Then click Access Options.  Under Current Database find Name AutoCorrect Options.  Make sure both Track name AutoCorrect and Perform name AutoCorrect are both checked to turn on this feature.

This has apparently been a user option since Access 2000.  The default is to have it turned off.  Apparently someone had enabled it for the versions of Access that you had used previously.  I found the information in Access 2007 Inside Out by John Viescas and Jeff Conrad which you might consider as a useful addition to your library.

Thanks for all the help guys. 

Peter: it works!  It looks like my home installation must have had it on by default.  And that information gets carried with that particular database file.  So, when I open it at the office, I keep that feature.

I created a brand-new file at the office, and that feature was NOT turned on.  Therefore, that’s why I was getting the inconsistent behaviour.

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Here are the reasons that I enjoy MS Access:
1. Extremely easy to import/export to/from flat file or excel.  This, by itself, is the one reason I stick with Access as much as I do.

2. MS Access is at the office, and I do alot of work here.  However, I’ve been using MySQL database that’s on my server lately, and it’s soon going to make obselete reason #2. 

3. Being able to create queries in design view on the fly, especially queries of queries, (and being able to flag AND SORT a comment in each query so I can show the order, which no longer exists in Access 2007).

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Reason #1 is pretty powerful, and is about the only reason standing that can justify me using Access.

Is there any advantage to using Access 2007 instead of 2003?

I much prefer the 2003 and have no plans to upgrade.  I like Access because of the ease of use.  I’m not a professional DB programmer by any means, and when I tried to set up a Mysql database, about the only think I was comfortable was writing sql queries.  I didn’t see how to import text or any other kind of data into it.

Your webserver should come with PHPMyAdmin.  That makes life easy for imports.

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I would not recommend any upgrade to Access 2007, though I presume performance has improved.

Slight tangent here, but has anyone had any comparitive experience with Excel 2007 vs. Excel 2003 in a heavy computational context?  I have read some stuff suggesting that for files with a lot of formulae or a lot of data, the calculations take a lot longer in Excel 2007, which is a killer for what I need Excel to do.  Also, I’ve run Hit Tracker in 200(well, one of my asisstants did), and the macros didn’t work right in it, which is another killer.

Any personal experiences to share on Excel 2007?

Greg - I have run very large databases (150K+ rows) with quite a bit of computation in Excel 2007 and I haven’t found it to be abnormally slow.  Speed of execution is dependent on so many variables that I am not sure that you can generalize from computer to computer and specific application to specific application.

Excel 2007 switched to VBA for writing macros.  There is supposed to be backward functionality with some older macros, but I have no experience with trying to run any.  I do a lot of automated processing with the VBA macros and find them relatively easy to write and debug and very flexible in what they can accomplish.  But if you are proficient in writing the older macros it just means you have to start over again from scratch.