Access – Working with DBase dbf Files With Names That Are More Than 8 Characters

Official Fix Released (2018-08-07)
Before going any further, the workaround elaborated in the following article may no longer be necessary as I am happy to announce that the Access Dev Team just informed me that they have “added support for longer dBase file names, and currently support up to 64 chars.
This change is rolling out to O365 customers, and should be available to all (if not already) very shortly.” (which corresponds to Office365 Build 1807).

Have you ever needed to Import or Link a DBase DBF file in an Access? If your DBF filename is longer than 8 characters you’ll be in for a nice treat!


and once you click OK, you’ll get a nice error!!!

 So, it would seem that Access can’t handle dbf files with filenames that are more than 8 characters long.  We’re living back in the days of DOS.

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MS Access – Delete Attachments Using a Query

Working on a client’s database, I was in need of deleting the attachments associated to a record and couldn’t make it work using standard DELETE syntax

DELETE MyAttachments
FROM Att

which would generate the following error

An UPDATE or DELETE query cannot contain a multi-valued field

I searched high and low and couldn’t find any direct way to delete attachments using a simple query. Every post I came across always pointed to using VBA code. So I put out an SOS to my fellow Access MVPs and luckily for me Brent Spaulding came to my rescue!

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Access – Unlocking an Access VBA Project

I recently needed to unlock an Access VBA Project for which my client had lost the password. I was surprised to find that there was an incredibly simple hack that can unlock any Access password protected VBA project and I figured I’d share in case it could help others.

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Access – Using Split() in a Query

I often needed to use the Split() Function in queries and was confronted with the  “Undefined function ‘Split’ in expression”.  Now don’t get me started as to why such a basic function would not be natively accessible in the query editor, but at least there is a very simple solution.

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MS Access – High DPI issues

With the higher and higher screen resolutions we are starting to see issues with Office application and High DPI displays. For instance, if you look at the following Answers forum thread

Has anybody at Microsoft ever edited an Access Form Chart control on a zoomed high DPI display?

you can see a few screenshots of just how useable Access can become in a High DPI environment.  Now, I mention Access, but this can be an issue with pretty much any application (Excel, Word, Outlook, …) and the fix elaborated below is applicable to any of them as well.

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MS Access – Bug – Context Menus Are Gone?!

Software Bug

No, you’re not hallucinating, the context menus have disappeared!

A couple posts started surfacing this week regarding system context menus no longer rendering, see:

Access 2016 Context Menu Problem
Right click not working in Access 2013
Right click on the title bar doesn’t work no more !
Changement du comportement du clic droit dans les formulaires et états avec Access 2016

I immediately forwarded these reports to Microsoft and this evening they advised us that a fix should already be in place! Apparently, one need only shutdown Access and restart it and the issue should resolve itself. Worse case scenario, the fix may need a day to propagate.

If you are still experiencing the issue tomorrow after a shutdown/restart of Access please let me know by posting a comment so I can forward this information to the Access Dev Team.

MS Access – Use Word Document As Outlook E-mail Body

Once again, trying to help someone out with a question in a forum lead to me creating the following function that I thought I’d share in case it could serve others. I can’t take credit for the base code, I merely cleaned it up substantially and switched it over to using Late Binding so it is more versatile.

The idea is simple, use a word document as the body of a new Outlook e-mail. So we need to open the document, copy its content, then start a new e-mail and paste in the content. Below is the resulting code.

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MS Access – Determine Build Number

With the never ending updates for Office 365/2016 it has become necessary to be able to determine what build number you, your users, are running to be able to determine if you have all the latest updates installed, and/or determine if you have a known bugged update installed… so you can determine if you need to update/revert your installation.

As per most things, it isn’t really hard to locate this information once you’ve done so once.

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