Access power users and programmers at all levels will rely on the Access Cookbook, Second Edition for quick solutions to gnarly problems. Fully updated for Access 2003, it's also one of the first books to thoroughly explore new support for .NET managed code and XML. All of the examples have been tested for compatibility with Access 2003, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. This new edition also covers Access with SharePoint, SmartTags, .NET; and XML.
This is an idea book. It's a compendium of solutions and suggestions devoted to making your work with Microsoft Access more productive. If you're using Access and you aspire to create database applications that are more than wizard-created clones of every other database application, this is the book for you.
If, on the other hand, you're looking for a book that shows you how to create a form, or how to write your first Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) function, or how to use the Crosstab Query Wizard, this may not be the book you need. For those kinds of things, we recommend one of the many Access books geared toward the first-time user.
You don't have to be a VBA whiz to use this book. It's designed for all levels of readers: end users, power users, and developers.
In every case, we've made the steps needed to implement our solution as simple as possible. When VBA is involved, we've recommended which modules to import from the sample database and discussed the important features of the code within the text. You shouldn't have to retype any of the code unless you care to—in fact, you shouldn't retype the code, since we rarely include every single line of code here in the book. We've pointed out the important code here but left much of the support code on the CD-ROM (see http://examples.oreilly.com/accesscook). What's more, you don't actually have to understand the solutions to most of the problems covered in this book in order to make use of them. In each case, you'll find a sample database that demonstrates the technique and explicit instructions on how to implement the same technique in your own applications. Of course, you'll learn the most by digging into the samples to see how they work, and each solution includes comments to help you understand the underlying technology.
