Denver Area Access Users Group

Ring in the New Year with some new ideas for your applications as we take a look at using Web (REST) Api's in Access. With just a bit of VBA and a couple of great libraries, you can make use in your applications of any data source on the Internet. We'll take a look at reading from a publicly-available API, as well as creating our own Web API from a SQL backend and using it for full CRUD operations in Access!

George first encountered Microsoft Access when using the thirty-plus floppy disk versions of Office to teach Statistics and MIS in the early 1990’s. It’s been true love ever since. George has worked as a software developer for the past twenty-five years, half of that time at Microsoft (in just about every group other than Office). He is the founder and president of Dawson Butte Software, working primarily on .NET applications (often with Access somewhere in the mix). George still has a commercial site or two that is driven by an Access database sitting in the server file system.

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Watch the recorded video of Using Web API's in Access on our YouTube channel

IMPORTANT: This presentation is at 10:30 AM Mountain Time

What's the mood in the Access village? What has been happening recently in Redmond and elsewhere for the product? What can be expected for 2023? And beyond? A funny report from the community and developer angle:

• Market situation, version statistics, current problems
• New features, bugs and fixes, backgrounds
• Changes and flaws on Microsoft's Access web pages
• Survival training while wrestling with update bugs
• New activities in the worldwide Access ecosystem
• Third-party tools and prospects
• And what's the 2nd verse of the Access song? Be prepared for anything!

Karl is an Access developer and MVP since the 90s. He organizes conferences, does presentations, workshops and videos. Due to an obstinate nature he has dedicated himself to tilt at windmills, fighting the bad image of Access and the worse intentions, boasting in poor armour in various languages, countries and funny places, including an English wedding castle, a Calabrian sanctuary and several MSFT offices.

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Watch the recorded video of The Current State of Access on our YouTube channel

Take a real world journey into an Access application and the transformation from MSGraph.Chart.8 charts to the use of the Chartjs solution known as Better Access Charts (BAC) created by Thomas Moeller. We'll take a look at my prior attempt to integrate BAC 1.28.04 and my new attempt to integrate the latest version of BAC --> 2.30.02. Well look at differences, requirements, pitfalls, and what is the potential for this solution with the prospect of the new web browser control expected in April of 2023.

Phil is a database software developer and founder of AFL Enterprises, LLC, located in Denver, CO. Phil's been developing in Access for over 20 years and designs software database applications for all industries. A member of DAAUG since the early 2000s, Phil is an occasional presenter to the group and learns something new about the Access environment at every meeting. When Phil isn't coding a superb database app, he's either spending time with his family or training for a marathon.

Watch the recorded video of Integrating Better Access Charts Into An Application on our YouTube channel

One year ago, Tom announced to DAAUG that a new Northwind Traders sample Access application was under development. Today, he and the team announce the release of Northwind Traders 2.0, in two versions, Starter and Developer. Join us as Tom demos the new Northwind, highlighting new features and how the sausage was made!

Tom is the Software Development Manager of Kinetik I.T. in Phoenix, Arizona, a full service information technology and internet services provider offering a wide array of technology and internet strategy solutions. Tom has a degree from Amsterdam University and came to the United States in 1991. After a few years with C++ and Windows SDK programming, he gradually focused more and more on database programming. He worked with Microsoft Access from version 1.0, and Microsoft SQL Server from version 4.5, when both were quite immature products.

Watch the recorded video of Northwind 2.0 Is Here! on our YouTube channel

Make your Access application feel more professional with a consistent user interface design. Form templates make it easy.

One of the best ways to make your Access application feel more professional is with a consistent user interface design. And one of the easiest ways to get a consistent UI design is with form templates. In this presentation, Access MVP Mike Wolfe will disciss and demo four approaches for using form templates.

Mike runs Grandjean & Braverman, Inc., specializing in Microsoft Access and SQL Server software solutions for government, banking, and insurance clients. He writes daily articles about advanced Access and VBA topics at nolongerset.com, where he’s published over 500 articles since 2020. Mike is the most recently awarded Access MVP, earning the award in November 2021.

Watch the recorded video of Form Templates in Microsoft Access on our YouTube channel

The new Northwind 2.0 Access templates were released a few months ago. The Developer Edition template uses inventory management based on the method Allen Browne described in 2010. This method requires regular physical stocktake events so that database calculations start from known quantities on hand.

In this presentation, George Hepworth will demo a mobile application, using a bar code scanner, to conduct stocktakes in a warehouse location with or without a constant internet connection. This solution combines Access, PowerApps, and Dataverse components in a hybrid application you can replicate for your own clients.

George began his love affair with MS Access in the early 90’s when he was tapped to create a tracking system for the continuing education courses he and his colleagues wrote and sold. He decided that was more interesting than the writing side and began the transition. Over the next 25 years, George worked in a variety of environments as a database developer focusing on Access and later, SQL Server with Access. He authored or co-authored several books on Access and currently serves on the Administration team at UtterAccess.

Watch the recorded video of Extending Access with a PowerApps Barcode Scanner on our YouTube channel

Have you ever wanted to allow the pasting in of data from another source into Access, while preserving input formats? In this presentation, Access MVP Richard Rost is going to show how to write very useful functions to filter out unwanted characters from a text field (or string) in Microsoft Access.

For example, you can force users to enter only digits into a phone number field by setting up an Input Mask. However, what if you want to copy and paste from emails and such. That doesn't work with an Input Mask. How can we allow the user to paste a phone number into the field and then just remove anything but the digits?

Richard Rost is an Access MVP and the owner of Computer Learning Zone, a technology education firm based in Florida. Richard has been teaching software courses since 1994, and was an Access MVP in 2014 and 2015. He has an extensive online library of Access training videos at his YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/599cd.

Watch the recorded video of Custom Data Entry Filter Functions in Access on our YouTube channel

Access MVP Armen Stein will lead you on an exploration beyond database design standards and best practices. He will cover useful techniques and patterns such as:

• Designing for flexible and powerful user permissions far beyond hierarchical levels, that put your users fully in control
• Storing variable, expandable data using attribute-value pairs (and when not to use them)
• Recording application usage telemetry events, so that you always know which parts of your application are being used - and which ones are being neglected
• Storing diagnostic data, to help you with debugging those long and complex calculations and processes
• Designing tables and fields to avoid hardcoding special values

Armen is the founder and president of J Street Technology, a team of 15 developers, designers and support staff located near Seattle. J Street has designed and built hundreds of custom Access desktop and ASP.NET web applications since 1994, and also supports dozens of Access and web applications that were built by others.

Armen is an Access MVP since 2006, and has spoken at many user groups and conferences around the world. He also regularly guest lectures on requirements discovery and database design at a local college. His other interests include travel, photography, Kauai, backgammon, movies, supporting people with disabilities in Nepal, and driving his 1969 Ford Bronco in the sun.

Watch the recorded video of Advanced Database Design on our YouTube channel

IMPORTANT: This presentation is at 10:30 AM Mountain Time

Over the many years of his Access work, including some innovative Access UI programming in VBA, Alessandro Grimaldi has collected quite a number of VBA snippets. Join us as he presents a number of what he calls "VBA pills", showing tricks and techniques you might not know yet.

Topics include:

• Hardware info (computer, memory, hard disks, monitors)
• Tools: magnifier, screenshots, webcam, whatsapp
• Zip files: zip, unzip, file counting
• Working with records: delete duplicates, get next record ID
• Working with files: read a whole folder, shorten a path

A programmer since 1983, VBA since 1998, for several years Alessandro was consulting for the United Nations in different countries (Italy, Afghanistan, North Korea, Ethiopia, Austria), creating tons of Office applications, from simple automation tools to corporate level applications. Since 2014 he lives in Frankfurt where for five years he worked as a VBA developer for the European Central Bank. He has been experimenting on graphical interfaces with Access since 2006.

Watch the recorded video of "VBA Pills" - Access Tips and Tricks on our YouTube channel

IMPORTANT: This presentation is at 10:30 AM Mountain Time

Join us as Alex from SD Win presents an add-in which allows the use of Chat GPT (OpenAI) in Microsoft Access. The add-in offers a user and a developer menu, and requires no additional code necessary to use the full power of OpenAI. The add-in is available for all Access versions from 2007. There is a 32 and a 64 bit version of the add-in. It is multilingual and includes German, English, French, Italian and Spanish as standard, but can easily be individually expanded to any language.

Alex Denz is a developer at SD Win in Austria, with two decades of Access exprience. SD Win does Enterprise Resource Planning and custom development, offering free and paid tools

Watch the recorded video of ChatGPT in Access on our YouTube channel

No General Meeting in December. DAAUG members in the Denver area will have a dinner gathering at a location to be announced. See you all in 2024!