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Alison Barrows
Alison Barrows is the author or coauthor of several books about Access, Windows, and the Internet. Joseph Stockman is an 18-year software designer who has authored or coauthored five Access programming books. Allen Taylor is a 30-year veteran of the computer industry and the author of over 20 books.
Articles & Books From Alison Barrows
Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-27-2016
Access 2013 makes managing your data easy, combining a visual interface with the power of a relational database. Discover how to organize data into tables, design forms and reports for editing and presenting information, and create queries for selecting and combining information. The next steps are writing macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripts to make your database smart, and using SharePoint to publish data to the web.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
You can create an unbound form that appears when you open an Access 2013 database. Follow these steps to make your new form and the macro that will open the form automatically:
Create a new form by clicking the Form Design button in the Forms group on the Create tab of the Ribbon.
Access opens a form in Design view.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
If you’re a user of Access 2000 through 2010, you may be familiar with Access Data Project (ADP) files — Access data files that provide access to SQL Server databases. Access 2013 drops support for the ADP format, and Microsoft recommends one of the following alternatives:
Continue using the same version of Access.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Almost every Access user winds up with blank pages in a report; the blank pages appear in Print Preview. What causes these extra pages, anyway — and how do you get rid of them?
Access knows the width of your paper and how much space to leave for the left and right margins because these sizes are specified in the report’s property sheet.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Want to make a brand new form in Access 2013? Here’s how — in less than ten steps — you can create and adjust your Access form to your liking:
Create the form by using a wizard, adding an Application Part, or making a blank form.
Decide among these options based on what you want your form to look like. You may want to run a few wizards and add a few Application Parts forms to see whether any of them looks like a good starting point for the form you want to create.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
If you want to filter multiple fields in Access 2013, the flexible Filter by Form feature is what you need. Although you can apply the filters to the various fields by using several different techniques, the Filter by Form feature lets you define all your filters for the table at the same time and then see the results.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Just seeing the name of a built-in function in the third column of the Access 2013 Expression Builder doesn't tell you much. You don't know what the function does or how you use it, but you can get instant information by clicking the Help button. Follow these steps to access an Access help window:
In the left column of Expression Builder, if the Functions folder has a plus sign (+) next to it, click that sign to expand the list.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Access 2013 uses the same file format as Access 2007 and Access 2010 for storing its databases, but previous versions of Access use a different format. You can tell what version a database is by opening it in Access and looking at the title bar. The title bar may display (Access 2000 file format) or (Access 2002-2003 file format) for an old format, or nothing or (Access 2007 - 2013) for the new format.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
When an Access 2013 database form is open, you can use VBA code to change the contents and even the appearance of the form, from the big picture down to the individual controls.
Suppose that you have a form that includes a control for choosing a payment method. When the user chooses a payment method, you want to enable or disable other controls on the form based on the selected payment method.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Some people would rather use the keyboard than the mouse, and Access 2013 has plenty of keyboard shortcuts for those people. The following keyboard shortcuts are especially useful in Access 2013. Some keystrokes work anywhere in Access 2013; others work only in specific views, as noted.
Key Combination
Action
F1
Displays the Help window
Ctrl+F1
Hides or displays the Ribbon
F5
Goes to the record with the record number you type
F6
Moves the focus to another area of the window
F7
Checks the spelling in the selected object
F11
Hides or displays the Navigation Pane
Del
Deletes the selected object
Alt+Enter
In Design view, displays the properties of the selected
object
Ctrl+C
Copies the selected text or objects to the clipboard
Ctrl+F
Finds text (with the option to replace it) in the open table,
query, or form
Ctrl+N
Starts a new database
Ctrl+O
Opens a database
Ctrl+P
Prints the selected object
Ctrl+S
Saves the selected object
Ctrl+V
Pastes the contents of the clipboard to the active window
Ctrl+X
Deletes the selected text or object and saves it in the
clipboard
Ctrl+Z
Undoes the last action that can be undone (our all-time
favorite!