In June, 2001: Our congenial Microsoft host, Greg Nicholson, talked about Access 2002’s Data Access Pages (DAP) – a way to use Access directly to create web pages that interact with an Access database. While the usefulness of DAPs in Access 2000 was limited mostly to Intranets, the Access 2002 DAPs are usable (with a free download) by people who do not have Office installed with the Office Web Extensions. Thus they can be used to create an interactive database at a general Internet web site. Greg also covered using DAPs with Team Services, an approach to workgroup computing using Office XP.

In May, 2001: Matt Hester of Microsoft Corporation gave us a great presentation on Microsoft Visio 2000 for Database Development. He began his discussion in the Application Developer Issues SIG and continue through the Access SIG, briefly discussing Visio’s features (far beyond the charting tool many think it to be), the nature of UML (Unified Modeling Language) and modeling in general, demonstrating Visio 2000 using UML to generate the structure of an object-oriented VB application. In the Access SIG, he continued with forward engineering database design documentation to produce SQL Data Definition Language that can be used in Access or other databases to generate the table structure and relationships, and how Visio can be used to document and reverse engineer database schemas.

In April, 2001: One of our favorite presenters, Assistant SIG Leader Tom Browning discussed his approach to a Generic Report. Tom developed this approach to fill a need for an easy-to-create report, with improved process time, handling many different sources of data, for simple or complex processes, with a simple report format consisting of a header and a few columns of data. His solution is a table-driven report generator, using SQL for its processes, that loads an output table for reporting. I think his innovative approach will benefit many Access applications, and could be extended to work with forms, as well.