Is Access a Low-Code/No-Code Solution?

At this past Ignite conference, our new Microsoft Access Program Manager, Michael Aldridge, hosted a session regarding the new Access Dataverse Connector. I briefly touched upon this in my article Access Session At Microsoft Ignite, Yes It Is True! and provided a link to the recording of the session itself Bringing Microsoft Access into the Future: Introducing the Microsoft Access Connector for the Microsoft Power Platform.

In the session, Michael mentions several times the fact that Microsoft Access was a low-code/no-code solution

Access was one of the originators of the low-code/no-code solution development before it was even called that — around 1:20Michael Aldridge

and I wanted to touch upon this statement for one moment.

Important Note!
Before going any further, I wanted to emphatically state that I do not think Michael meant in any way to demean Access or the Access Developer Community in any manner with such as statement. He seems to be very supportive of Access.

We have to put the comment into the context of the presentation being given (Dataverse which is being promoted as low-code/no-code), but I thought it still brought forth a good subject for discussion. So put away your pitchforks and let’s have a frank look at Access for one moment.

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Access – Determine If a Control Exist Or Not

It is a bit of a weird need, but there are certain situations that can require one to need to determine whether or not a specific control exists within a form or report.

I was recently working on automating a modularized form setup and needed to exactly that. As such, I created a simple function to perform such a check and thought I’d share it.

I started creating 2 different functions, one for forms and one for reports, but eventually and revised my code to the following function which works for both.

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Creating Multi-Lingual Databases, What’s Involved

Translate

I recently contributed to a forum thread, Multi Language Support, regarding multi-lingual databases and thought I’d elaborate a little on the subject based on my experience.

The Obvious

When you start thinking of trying to develop a multi-lingual application you look at your forms and reports and quickly realize that you need to create the means to provide translation for things like:

  • Buttons
  • Labels

The Less Obvious

Quite often, people overlook a great many other aspects of the database that need translating like:

  • Form/Report Captions
  • Combobox/Listbox Row Sources
  • Control Default Values
  • Control Tip
  • Tags if you use them in certain ways (generate pop-ups, …)
  • Error Messages, Dialogs, Prompts, …
  • Date/Time values as different languages often use different formats
  • Documentation

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Taking Screenshots In Your Access Database

Camera

In one of my applications, I wanted to enable my users to easily be able to take a screenshot of an Access database object of their choosing.

Now, there are some truly great tools out there, such as:

That said, my need was for an integrated tool with no installation! So what was one to do exactly?

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Determine ODBC Drivers Using VBA and PowerShell

I was playing around with PowerShell and came across a CmdLet that I thought could be interesting to us database people, the Get-OdbcDriver CmdLet.

Like most CmdLets, Get-OdbcDriver is very straightforward to use.

For instance, you need only do (I’m using “| Format-Table” to make the returned data more compact for the purposes of trying to keep this article shorter in overall length, but it isn’t strictly necessary):

Get-OdbcDriver | Format-Table

and then you’ll get returned a complete listing of all the OBDC drivers on the PC, such as

Name                                     Platform        Attribute                                                        
----                                     --------        ---------                                                        
Driver da Microsoft para arquivos tex... 32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Driver do Microsoft Access (*.mdb)       32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Driver do Microsoft dBase (*.dbf)        32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Driver do Microsoft Excel(*.xls)         32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Driver do Microsoft Paradox (*.db )      32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)          32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Microsoft Access-Treiber (*.mdb)         32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Microsoft dBase Driver (*.dbf)           32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Microsoft dBase-Treiber (*.dbf)          32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Microsoft Excel Driver (*.xls)           32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Microsoft Excel-Treiber (*.xls)          32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Microsoft ODBC for Oracle                32-bit          {APILevel, FileUsage, Driver, ConnectFunctions...}               
Microsoft Paradox Driver (*.db )         32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Microsoft Paradox-Treiber (*.db )        32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Microsoft Text Driver (*.txt; *.csv)     32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
Microsoft Text-Treiber (*.txt; *.csv)    32-bit          {APILevel, DriverODBCVer, FileUsage, Driver...}                  
SQL Server                               32-bit          {APILevel, FileUsage, Driver, ConnectFunctions...}               
Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb, *.accdb) 32-bit          {Driver, APILevel, FileExtns, FileUsage...}                      
Microsoft Excel Driver (*.xls, *.xlsx... 32-bit          {Driver, APILevel, FileExtns, FileUsage...}                      
Microsoft Access Text Driver (*.txt, ... 32-bit          {Driver, APILevel, FileExtns, FileUsage...}                      
ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server            32-bit          {Driver, APILevel, FileUsage, Setup...}                          
SQL Server                               64-bit          {APILevel, FileUsage, Driver, ConnectFunctions...}               
ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server            64-bit          {Driver, APILevel, FileUsage, Setup...}

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Microsoft Feedback Portal, The New UserVoice

Microsoft Feedback

Anyone that follows my blog, you know my thoughts on what was once known as UserVoice; a great concept, horribly implemented and not properly administered!

As I mentioned back in September in my post UserVoice For Access In Gone UserVoice was finally killed off by Microsoft. In my earlier post on the subject Bye Bye UserVoice! the question was “What will replace it, if anything?” Well, today, I have the answer!

Say hello to the Microsoft Feedback Portal, UserVoice’s successor.

The Excel team published a post on the subject yesterday: Announcing the new Microsoft Feedback portal – accepting suggestions now!. Sadly, no mention of it in the Access blog. 🙁

The Excel team describes the portal as:

… where you can submit suggestions about … Microsoft products, vote and comment on suggestions made by others, and see feedback you’ve submitted.

So the exact same idea as UserVoice at the end of the day.

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Get Printer Information Using PowerShell Via VBA

In today’s post, I thought I’d explore Printers via PowerShell a little.

  • Have you ever needed to determine what printers where installed on a PC?
  • Have you ever needed to determine the default printer on a PC?
  • Have you ever needed to stop, or start, the print spooler?

All these things are easy to accomplish with PowerShell.

Note that the functions provided below rely on my PS_GetOutput() function which is part of my post VBA – Run PowerShell Command.

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Get a List of Installed Programs Using VBA and PowerShell

Ever wanted to retrieve a listing of Installed Software on a PC?
Ever needed to confirm whether a application was installed on a PC?

If you Google the subject you can find discussions and post that get into using APIs, …

Today, however, I thought I’d continue investigating how PowerShell might be able to simplify this task.

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SQL Server 2022 Is Here, What’s New!

I thought I’d share a link to a video, I came across yesterday, that discussed some of SQL Server 2022‘s newest features that Microsoft recently posted on their Microsoft Mechanics YouTube channel, things like:

  • Disaster recovery (bidirectional with the cloud)
  • Azure Synapse integration
  • Built-in query intelligence (multiple execution plans for the same query/Intelligent query execution plans)

If you want to know a few of the new and improved features in SQL Server 2022 then take a look at What’s new in SQL Server 2022.

I’m sure more will be coming out on the subject shortly.