As an MVP, we are granted the privilege of getting Not For Resale licenses of certain software to take for a test run.

I recent installed and tested FMS’ Total Access Analyzer (Database Analysis for Access 2010). Below are my thoughts.

 

Installation

Nothing could be simpler! Simply download the ‘setup.exe’ and run it.

 

Impressions

The usage of the Total Access Analyzer is once again very straight forward and highly customizable!

You can not only select what type of objects (tables, queries, forms, reports, macros, modules, command bars) your wish to analyze, but you can select the specific object itself. So you can analyze just one specific table or the whole database in one shot.

Once you select the object to analyze, then you decide what analysis to perform.

The Analysis is relatively speedy, especially when you think of just how many elements it is checking for.

The result were very impressive and well organized so as to facilitate addressing the urgent issues first and progressively address suggestions and performance recommendations.

What I also appreciated what the ability to check off elements as I reviewed/fixed them.

Not only do you get a list of issues, but another truly nice feature of this add-on is that when you select any individual entry, you are given a detailed explanation in the lower pane. I found this to be a great help as in numerous cases it explains how to fix the issue either through the UI or even giving you the VBA property to edit.

Another beautiful aspect of this add-in is that you can export the findings to various formats (HTML, PDF, RTF, Text).

 

Conclusion

I am truly impressed.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this add-in, but I have been very pleased with it in my testing and plan on trying it out further in the coming weeks.

It is an easy to use tool and provides a huge amount of useful information in bite size piece that permits a developer to tackle one by one. It is highly flexible as well.

I am glad that I had the opportunity to become aware of this add-in and I would have no hesitation to recommend to both new and experienced developers.