Microsoft Access supports Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook through a downloadable Link Manager. In this article, Garry Robinson shows you how to set up a Web-based system to help automate your e-mail collection using Access 97. Also published in MSDN. Read more

Using Microsoft Access To Display Spatial Information

Microsoft Access isn’t known as a tool for displaying spatial or mapping information. But, with a few special tricks, some crosstab queries, and MSGraph, you can transform coordinates into useful map like grids. Read more

The Chart object that ships with Microsoft Office can be daunting to use, but it also lets you create very flexible displays. In this article, Garry Robinson shows you not only how to use this powerful automation tool but provides information on the pitfalls as well. Also published in MSDN. Read more

Garry Robinson has been running an interactive Web site for his company, and he gets a number of e-mails asking, "How did you do that?" Here are the answers to some of the more interesting Access-related issues.

The wizard interface is one of the most successful that Microsoft has created. Included in this the accompanying Download file is a wizard to help you create the user interface wizards that Garry Robinson explains in the article.

Graf-FX is a shareware application written entirely in Access . It’s designed to provide tools to explore your databases with graphs and queries using a technique called data mining. This article explains how the product can be used.

Microsoft Access supports using Excel as a database through the Link table manager. Garry Robinson shows how that works, using a Contact software database that allows you to manage Company and related information and even handle unsupported things like deleting records and renaming key fields

From Garry Robinson, the author of the Graf-FX data mining tool, here’s a comprehensive look at how you can use consolidation queries in Access. And we’re not just talking about how to use Group By as incorporating functions and other special joining mechanisms are discussed. Read more

Microsoft Chart is one of the many controls that’s bundled in the Professional and Enterprise editions of Visual Basic, and with 190 methods and properties, you’d imagine it to be one of the best. Read more

Thanks to Internet search engines, users are now starting to insist on tools that will interrogate the text in databases and retrieve information that relates to that text. In this article, Garry outlines a simple tool to search backend databases to find the location of text strings in any table of that database.  Also published in MSDN.

In this article, Garry Robinson provides you with a simple class module you can use to manipulate Microsoft Excel. You might want to incorporate the class into your own reporting routines.

Visual Data Mining -- Garry Robinson
Access features many data analysis capabilities; some are built-in, while other require some VBA. Mr Robinson shares a few of his favorites of both, with an emphasis on the eye catching.

Time Control -- Garry Robinson
Mr Robinson shares a custom Access form that makes entering times (e.g. beginning and ending times for a task) easy for end users. It performs similarly to an ActiveX control without the headaches.