Tony's Microsoft Access Blog : Office, Access

Did you know that you can change the PCs date and time from VBA code?

Tony — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 22:44:19 GMT

I didn’t. Until I read The Daily WTF article Trans-Atlantic Time Trap. There’s a link leading to a 2004 thread on this topic Change System Date via VBA. Glad to see that fellow Access MVP Truitt B got bored one Saturday Note that one poster commented that if you used Date and Time as the names of fields in tables or controls on forms or reports you could have issues.

I tried just the following VBA code on my Windows 7 system and received a Permission Denied error message which is, in my opinion, quite reasonable.

date = #2012-01-01#

If I run Access as an administrator it does let me change the date. (I very quickly changed it back.)

I then tried creating a control named Date on a form and then assigned it a string value.

Date = “test”

I then got a Type MisMatch message. Which makes sense once you realize what is happening.

Next I tried

me.Date = “text”

but this gave me an Invalid use of Me Keyword. Which also makes sense too. But very, very confusing to someone who doesn’t realize that these are reserved words.

Speaking of reserved words a friend was happily working on a timesheet system using a table called Union. Which worked just fine for months until he had to create a union query using that table.

For the definitive list see Allen Browne’s Problem names and reserved words in Access.

VBA Unit testing for Office

Tony — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 04:20:42 GMT

No idea how useful this is but a posting on Stack Overflow mentioned VBAUnit VBAUnit is an extension of Beck and Gamma's JUnit unit-testing framework designed to work in Microsoft's Office2000 using Visual Basic For Applications.

Microsoft Office Diagnostics fixed “SendObject stopped responding”

Tony — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:48:55 GMT

A posting titled SendObject stopped responding caught my attention. in it Rick stated “I finally ran the microsoft office diagnostics and it found one error and repaired it. “ You can find Microsoft Office Diagnostics on your Windows XP Programs menu at Windows Office <inset year here> menu >> Microsoft Office Tools. Or search for it in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Thanks to Rick for posting his experience. I also thank Len Hannam of the Visual Basic and Developers user group in Edmonton for mentioning this tool a while back. I must confess I never noticed it before.

vbMAPI - Outlook Security Evader for Office / VBA and classic VB6

Tony — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 02:58:15 GMT

vbMAPI - Outlook Security Evader for Office / VBA and classic VB6 Another interesting product by Wayne Phillips.

Thanks to fellow MVP Alex Dybenko for noticing this.

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.

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.