What I Learned Today

I've been inspired by Seth Godin's "Is effort a myth?" blog entry
(http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/10/is-effort-a-myt.html)
to try and follow his "effort diet". The hardest part for me is going
to be the writing part, so here goes.

This will likely start as a series of posts on Access (since, ugh,
that's what I'm working with right now).

I'm not a huge Access fan, but I think it's a great tool for single
user/semi technical/entrepreneurial type environments.

I've spent the past week working on modifying a billing application.
Something I learned today:

The DoCmd object has a ton of handy little shortcuts hanging off of
it. In a non access environment, you'd have to write DTS, maybe some
API calls, and do a lot more scrubbing to replicate the functionality
in any of these methods. The one I used today is DoCmd.OutputTo.
This lets you open a "Save As..." dialog to save some dataset
(probably works for reports, too).

DoCmd.OutputTo acOutputQuery, tempQueryName, acFormatXLS

Where tempQueryName is an ad-hoc query I created based on user input.
Cool beans! It doesn't get much simpler than that. Just goes to show: Access isn't always the devil.

I'd still rather be using a real tool though :-p

(though if there was a nice IDE and ReSharper for Access, not sure
that I'd be nearly so confident in that statement)