Tony's Microsoft Access Blog : Office

Office DevCon in Australia

Tony — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:35:08 GMT

For those of you who don't know, Office DevCon (http://www.officedevcon.com.au) is the largest and most popular annual community-driven conference in the southern hemisphere. It allows Microsoft Office developers and power users to come together in one location to hear expert speakers from around the world present on a wide range of Microsoft Office-related topics.

Over 2 days, you will hear in-depth presentations on advanced Office System technologies for Office 2003 and 2007, and 2010 (the next version), including Word, Access, Excel, SharePoint, Groove, and InfoPath. In essence, we are launching Office 2010 in Australia, so if you want to get up close and personal with Office 2010, you'll see it here first!

This year, the conference will be held at the University of Queensland (St. Lucia campus) over the weekend 31st October-1st November 2009. The conference is FREE to attend, but to allow the organizers to plan resources, please register at http://www.officedevcon.com.au/2009/register.htm.

We'd love to see you there. This only happens once a year, so don't miss out.

Regards,
Graham R Seach
Microsoft Access MVP & Conference Organizer

Office 2010 The Movie

Tony — Wed, 13 May 2009 02:57:34 GMT

Office 2010 The Movie Interesting video that. But notice the link to the Office 2010 blog.

Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview

Tony — Wed, 13 May 2009 02:25:32 GMT

The Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview is a limited, invitation only program which will provide you with the opportunity to experience early, pre-release versions of Office 2010 which will include the following applications: Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010, PowerPoint 2010, OneNote 2010, Access 2010, InfoPath 2010 and Publisher 2010.

Access 2007 SP2

Tony — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 07:14:49 GMT

Interesting updates (among others) in Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Microsoft Office System due to ship April 28th:

- The Microsoft Save As PDF or XPS add-in has been built into Office applications in SP2. Users no longer have to download and install the add-in separately.

Hmm, so the Microsoft lawyers changed their minds on Adobe's PDF patent claims or something like that? Nah, don't get me started on the ridiculous state of software patents in the USA.

Note: I'm not picking on Microsoft or Adobe here. I think most, or 99%, of software patents are useless and despicable. Only the frigging lawyers win. Copyright is fine though.

Test your VBA coding skills and win!

Tony — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:38:28 GMT

MSDN® is sponsoring a coding contest for Office 2007, named OfficePalooza! This sweepstakes will run two weeks beginning April 20, 2009, and features ten fun Visual Basic of Applications™ (VBA) coding challenges in the form of puzzles and games. Each entrant will earn a chance to win one of hundreds of available prizes, determined by a random drawing at the end of the contest.

In conjunction with this contest, an Advanced Business User theme will run on Microsoft Office Online from mid-April to mid-May, and will showcase the automation and extensibility aspects of Office 2007 through macros, custom VBA coding, the Fluent UI, and Office Open XML. This collaborative effort will also highlight existing and newly-created content on the MSDN Microsoft Office Developer Center.

There are a few Access challenges which could be interesting.

Microsoft to Extend Office to the Browser

Tony — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:00:06 GMT

Microsoft to Extend Office to the Browser, Office Goes to the Web and PDC: Microsoft to put Office online.

Given that the Access 2007 runtime is free I think it would be awesome if you could run an Access app from inside a web browser. Let the user take the large hit of downloading the Access runtime stuff from Microsoft once then downloads the FE MDE/ACCDE from your website. This would, of course, require that the data resides either in SQL Server somewhere or in the "cloud".

However, in my opinion, the data should not only be able to reside in Sharepoint. Sharepoint is a very useful tool in many respects. But it doesn't have referential integrity. And that just plain bothers me.

And yes this would mean that Access does not fit the Web Lite model that Google is using and now Microsoft is suggesting. That is the apps have only the most common features. Nope, I want all the VBA features I currently have in Access.

Also I don't want all that space taken up at the top by the browser buttons either. Hmmm, nah, why doesn't Microsoft just include the Access 2007 runtime in Windows 7 and be done with it.

Microsoft Office Discount for Students - The Ultimate Steal

Tony — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 00:03:37 GMT

Microsoft Office Discount for Students - The Ultimate Steal $64. That website is for Canadians but if you reside elsewhere click on the Country/Region link on the upper right hand side of the page.

Now this should really have been done up in the middle of August or so as I'm sure some students purchased the full retail copy. However that problem is somewhere in Microsoft USA as they only had this years promotion up and running a week or two ago.

We really do value them

Tony — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:39:53 GMT

A very nice Office Offline Web Comic about MVPs.

We really do value them

I quite enjoy his web comic and am subscribed to them in my open source blog reader RSS Bandit.

OfficeDevCon 2008, Sydney, Australia - 1-2 November, 2008

Tony — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:33:48 GMT

Fellow Access MVP Graham Seach is organizing the following event after his very successful OfficeDevCon last year.

"Office DevCon is an annual community-driven conference that allows Microsoft Office developers and power users to come together in one location to hear expert speakers present on a wide range of Office-related topics.

Over 2 days, you will hear presentations on advanced core Office technologies for Office 2003 and 2007, including Word, Access, Excel, SharePoint, PowerPoint, Groove, InfoPath, OneNote and Outlook. We may also be able to provide some previews of Office 14, the next version."

OfficeDevCon 2008, Sydney, Australia - 1-2 November, 2008

And I'm thinking that's gotta be a *LOT* of work. Graham, best wishes!

Microsoft to sell hosted service subscriptions for $3 a month (per user)

Tony — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:14:02 GMT

Microsoft to sell hosted service subscriptions for $3 a month (per user)

Interesting that. A fellow Access MVP has been playing around, err testing, Access 2007 and Sharepoint and quite enjoys it. I'm not so happy about the lack of referential integrity and such.

But I do want to play around with Access 2003/2007 and SQL Server via the Internet. In particular I'd like to see what happens when the network plug is pulled for 2, 10, 30 or 60 seconds. Or other weirdness. While I did get a good way through upsizing a very large Access system a number of years ago I never completed it

Bill Gates: Backstage at the Office Developer Conference

Tony — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:25:55 GMT

Thanks to fellow Access MVP Thomas Möller - Bill Gates: Backstage at the Office Developer Conference. He shares the history of Office as a developer platform, some hints on the future of Access, how he personally uses Office 2007, if he still writes code, and his view on whether Office has hit the productivity plateau.

A tantalizing hint on Access and Sharepoint at about the six minute point.

Microsoft Office Binary (doc, xls, ppt) File Formats

Tony — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 02:31:31 GMT

Now isn't this interesting. The Microsoft Office Binary (doc, xls, ppt) File Formats specifications are available for download. Although I suspect the Office 2007 XML based files would be much easier to work with.

Will the MDB/ACCDB format ever be published? All kinds of interesting speculation there but I have no idea

Note that there is a group working on reverse engineering the MDB format. MDB Tools is a set of open source libraries and utilities to facilitate exporting data from MS Access databases (mdb files) without using the Microsoft DLLs. Thus non Windows OSs can read the data. Or, to put it another way, they are reverse engineering the layout of the MDB file. Download the file and look at the hacking file.

What is annoying to me are the Access data recovery outfits which have copied that hacking file onto their web site with attributing the original creators of that document. See http://www.fdrlab.com/files/accessfileformat.txt and http://www.e-tech.ca/001-AccessFileFormat.asp. This web site copied part of it http://www.filerepair.net/bb/viewtopic.php?p=3&sid=096e617bca1533e1bdf7849e4fc70a69 but then referenced another web site http://www.etechrecovery.com/001-AccessFileFormat.asp.

How is Microsoft Office licensed?

Tony — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 01:51:10 GMT

How is Microsoft Office licensed? is an blog posting clarifying some details of Office licensing.

2007 Microsoft Office Security Guide

Tony — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 23:24:45 GMT

The 2007 Microsoft Office Security Guide provides prescriptive Group Policy setting and security configuration recommendations to help strengthen the security of computers running the 2007 Microsoft Office release on computers that run Windows Vista or Windows XP in domain–based environments.

In other words this document is of most interest to the IT administrators.

Learning Word 2007 if you're visually impaired

Tony — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:23:09 GMT

A number of techniques in the blog entry Learning Word 2007 if you're visually impaired should also apply to Access, Excel and PowerPoint.

Office SP3 is available for downloading

Tony — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:53:29 GMT

See Office 2003 sp3 for some details. Or you can download it directly here. Only 117.7 Mb. I'd suggest waiting a week or so just in case there are some surprises.

Another way to test drive Access 2007

Tony — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:33:00 GMT

You can download a Virtual PC VHD (Virtual Hard Drive) file containg Windows Vista and Office 2007, including Access 2007, from Microsoft Office 2007 Professional VHD. A link to download the now free Microsoft Virtual PC is also on that same page.

Note that you will need at least 512 spare MB of RAM not currently being used and 10 Gb of hard drive space.. That file is somewhere between "448.8 MB - 2548.8 MB*" according to that page. I'd think that you'd be safe in assuming the 2.5 Gb download size.

You also have to sigh at the following sentence. "This download offers you the benefits of registering with Microsoft." Benefits, uh huh. Marketing speak. Ah well, it's been my experience that Microsoft is relatively benign when it comes to sending you unwanted emails.

Ahh, now, Microsoft folks were quite smart on this large download. They split the download into four parts. I won't be downloading it though.

Added: I won't be downloading the VHD because I already have Office 2007 including Access 2007 installed on my system. Thus no need to download the file.

Office 2007 format documents in Office 2000, XP and 2003

Tony — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:56:00 GMT

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats From within Office 2000, XP and Office 2003 you can "Open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007."

Correct, this isn't Access related.