Sharepoint Designer

This video is good introduction into the world of Microsoft Expression tools. Lately I have been working on video and redoing vb123.com using Expression Web, the cousin of Sharepoint designer. The video goes for an hour, the guy is a good talker but more of the action occurs nearer the end. You will learn how to include data into a page without writing any asp code.

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/dustin/archive/2007/08/13/want-to-see-my-tech-ed-presentation.aspx

Note I needed a microsoft passport to see the action.

Please note that there are discussions on creating simple connections without code to Web Services but these are small on detail.

Creating a Totals row in a query

If you have ever built a query and wanted to display column totals like you would in Excel, it's been necessary to jump through a few hoops to achieve it. In Access 2007, the feature is built in.
To create a Totals row in Access 2007, do this:

1. Create a Select query with the fields that you want to display. It can be a Totals query if you like, or just a straight query.
2. Switch to Datasheet view, then select the Home tab and click the Totals (Sigma) button in the Records group. You will see a new row below your query, with the word Total in the first field.
3. For each field that you want to summarise, select the drop-down that appears in that field and pick the summary function (Sum, Average, Count ...) that you want to use.
4. The Totals row is a toggle: to hide it, click the Sigma button again to deselect it.

That's it. The example shows UK car sales data for 2004, grouped by country of origin.

To create a Totals row in earlier versions of Access, you need to get a bit more creative. This article shows one way to get the job done.

Denis Wright

Using OpenArgs to pass one or more parameters to a form when it opens

When you use DoCmd.OpenForm to launch a form, there are a number of parameters that you can use. At the end of the parameter string is OpenArgs, which doesn’t get as much use as it deserves. Basically, OpenArgs lets you pass a string or number to the opening form, which can then respond to that value in a number of ways. For example, you could:

• Send a single value which populates a predefined field (for example, the ID field)
• By building a string separated by pipe symbols, you can define field name | data pairs and parse that data when the form opens. In this way you can populate one or more fields with data from the caller form.
• Use a SQL string to filter a popup form, displaying specific data
• Another cool thing: OpenArgs works with reports too, so you can easily customise report filters on the fly.

To find out more, go here and also follow the link at the bottom of that page for an example that uses SQL to simplify many-to-many data entry.

Denis Wright

Inspiration for Improving Productivity

Dubai is building this corkscrew building and Bejing is building this crossover building and Sydney can hardly fix the local trains. Building stuff is inspirational as is improving productivity (building software). Doing nothing isn't a solution to your problems.

Are we there yet? Successfully navigating the bumpy road from Access to SQL Server. You can watch the 49 minute video panel discussion here