I’m starting a series of posts to promote some great tools to be aware of as an Access developer

Today, I’d like to introduce you to TheSmileyCoder’s Access Crash Reporter.

Any developer can attest that errors will occur and quite often users do not jot down the details of exactly what happened exactly thus making it very difficult to troubleshoot at times.  The Access Crash Reporter is a tool through which you can collect error data so you don’t have to solely rely on the users account of the problem.

This free tool gathers a tremendous amount of information:

• Error Source
  • Object
  • Control
  • Parent Object (if applicable)
• User
• OS Information
• Access Information
• and so much more!

about errors when they occur and can, amongst other things:

• Log errors to a tables
• Generate E-mails to notify the contact of your choosing when error occur supplying them with all the details, a Screenshot of the application and of the object involved

TheSmileyCoder has a 7 minute video on his site, or view it directly on YouTube by using the following link: Crash Report Tool – Demo, Setup and Instructions which briefly demonstrates the tool and the resulting error collection, e-mail, …

If you don’t have an error handling system yet, consider taking this one for a test drive. If you are new to the subject of Error Handling, you may also like to review my article MS Access – VBA – Error Handling.

If you do have a error handling system, consider taking this one for a test drive.  It truly adds some nice functionalities and makes error reporting much more user-friendly.

Update 2024-05-04: Since TheSmileyCoder’s site no longer exists, I have updated the links to point to an archived version of his site.