Ipads - Good for ordering chinese food

Back in the 90s, many of the engineers and geologists in the mining company that I worked for hated mainframes and loved pcs. We had good word processing and spreadsheets on the mainframe so this wasnt rational thought in the view of the IT department that I worked for. Nevertheless, we eventually gave in and let them have their PCs and the users went from hating us to loving us. They also started to mention that they like the mainframe (it was actually a Vax Mini computer or 2) a lot more than they used to. I suspect this phenomenon is just starting to occur between Tablets and PCs.

This article from september last year discusses this topic and as us PC developers are now the new IT department to tablet users, we need to get a handle on what is happening with our tablet users. Eventually when tablet users have had their fun, we can pull them back to less fragmented solutions.

The sun maybe getting ready for a cold phase

One of my geology buddies, Ian Levy, found the rather cold Australian summer was getting him down. So he wrote a paper on global temperature trends. Unfortunately for all those global meltdown enthusiasts, he put together a thesis that I concur with, Man does effect global temperatures but there are much bigger forces at play.
Ian writes "The soon‐to‐be released mean global surface temperature results for calendar year 2011 will be more important than most years for those who believe that the sun dominates our climate to such an extent that human‐induced carbon dioxide is only a minor influence on our global climate."  Read the full article called 2011 – A Watershed Year for Global Temperature Trends? here

Here is an alternative paper discussing the same cooling trend

Bottom line for Aussies is dump the tax on carbon.

Moving Files Using DropBox And Processing Them Later

This article shows how I move files to a remote pc using Dropbox and then rename them on the remote server using Logmein and an Acccess database.  Its mainly a pictorial but it  only involves files and folders and no Internet uploads and downloads.  So I like it. Here is the article

Saving All Tables To Comma Delimited Text Files

Before I started programming using Access 2, I was involved with a database of geological data that cost $50 million to put together. Another company bought the project, did nothing with the data for five years, and in the end couldn't read the backup tapes. When we were asked to help, we managed to recover the text data backups from our tapes, and these were used to build a reasonable copy of the database. We also recovered the database files from tapes, but the format was proprietary, and the software that could read the proprietary format was long gone. This is why I occasionally export database tables to text files. I dont trust files that that cannot be read with a text editor.

This story shows you how to export all the tables in an Access database, linked or standard Access format, to text files that you can read with Excel or a text editor. It then shows you how to read them back into a blank MS Access database.

Save All Objects To Text

The article from last months newsletter on Save all Objects to Text had a wrong link to the article (and another one that worked).  Here is where the article is at vb123.com

Windows Excel, Word, Powerpoint on an Ipad2

This ZDnet article shows how Onlive Desktop runs on an Ipad.  There is a discussion on using Dropbox as well, a topic that I will cover here soon

Dynamic Access 2007 and 2010 Reports - Get more from your database

This article explains the dynamic report view that came with Access 2007 and shows how you can add hyperlinks to your reports to open other reports and forms. The article is written for managers as it is not a complex topic. There is also a section on how to highlight data on your report using conditional formatting using colour in a special way.

See how hyperlinks and colour can be added to reports

 

Backup and recover queries, forms, reports and modules to/from text

A Microsoft Access database is a complex object that is subjected to much stress in network environments and by programming. As a result you need backups of your work. In this article I will show you the

Application.SaveAsText  and Application.LoadFromText methods

to save and then recover queries, forms, reports, macros and modules. To do this you will export all objects to text files in a sub folder using code that I will provide you.  Then you copy and paste some vba code that will be autogenerated and use that to populate an empty database with all your newly exported objects.

This whole process can also help you diagnose and sometimes help you recover an already corrupted database.

It will take you less than a quarter of an hour once you get the hang of it. Read the article here

A Happy New Year to all of you.

Garry Robinson
MS Access MVP 2006 - 2012