Working With Access Macros Efficiently

Okay, anyone that reads my blog, or knows me, knows there’s no love lost between myself and Macros.

They are very poor to work with, troublesome to troubleshoot, no means to copy/duplicate and just a plain Pain In The Ass to develop. Once again, another feature that was never fully developed.

Regardless, today I thought I’d share one easy little tip to hopefully help a few of you out there when working with Macros (this also applies to developing Microsoft Flows which are basically the same as developing Macros).

One Of The Main Problems With Working With Macros And Flows

I was working on troubleshooting a client’s database which uses a tremendous amount of macros and they don’t want to spend money converting over to VBA. I was having a hard time to identify where the issue was coming from and wanted to eliminate certain Macros, one by one, to identify the root cause of the problem. The issue is that Access offers no way to deactivate an Event/Macro (nor does flow).

Suggestion For Microsoft

Add a simple checkbox to Macro Actions so developers can easily toggle active/inactive individual Actions. The same would be great for Embedded Macros as a whole at the Event level!

As a developer you basically have 2 options:

Delete the Macro and then recreate it once you are done
Create a copy of the database to do your investigative work and then return to the original copy for development

Both approaches are far from ideal, typically involves a lot of duplication of work, …

How To Enable/Disable a Macro

A better solution is to edit the Macro and simply create an If action and place your existing Macro actions within it.

To Enable The Macro

If 1 = 1
   'Place your Normal Actions Here (Drag and Drop)
End If

So the If statement will evaluate to True, obviously as 1 does in fact equal 1, and thus run the rest of your macro actions as it always did.

To Disable the Macro

If 1 = 0
   'Place your Normal Actions Here (Drag and Drop)
End If

Inversely, in this case the macro If action will evaluate to False, since 1 does not equal 0, and will not process any further actions.

So now, you need only switch a single value to Activate/Deactivate a macro. No more need to work on duplicates copies of a database, delete/recreate macros, …

You can even apply the exact same principle to individual actions within a single macro giving you the ability to breakdown and troubleshoot single actions.

Hopefully this will prove informative and useful to a few of you out there, but I will reiterate my belief that you should do everything with VBA! Remember, Friends don’t let friends do Access Macros!