Customer Reviews

Access Hacks: Tips & Tools for Wrangling Your Data

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I rate this two stars, rather than one, because it's likely that most people will find something in the book which will put them onto a new way of doing something.

Unfortunately, the book (which includes "hacks" from seven contributors, as well as the principal author) is wildly uneven in quality. The poor quality varies from the text (it is noted that hack #9 is not an "eloquent" way of handling the problem) to the solutions presented. For instance, the example code in hack #22 turns off warnings -- but then never turns them back on, which could be rather disastrous (not to mention that any code which sets warnings FALSE absolutely needs an error handling routine which ensures these are turned back on). Hack #74, rated medium hard, introduces domain aggregate functions (DSum, DLookup, etc.), but the example code doesn't protect against situations when nothing matches the Where criteria -- so the example code will blow up if the DSum function returns NULL and tries to assign that to the Single variable. Examples relying implicitly on unnormalized tables abound. Would it have been so hard to think up examples that actually used normalized tables? Hack #19, rated medium hard, provides code to move through an overly-long form relying on SendKeys (!) to simulate PageUp and PageDown key presses. Rather than insert page breaks on the form and buttons relying on SendKeys on maneuver between these, why not just transform the long form into tabs on a tab control?

The above is illustrative, rather than an exhaustive list of hacks that are trivial, dumb or even dangerous. While there certainly are some hacks in the book which gave me food for thought, problems like the above which I could detect in other hacks made me wonder what I'll find out the hard way as I try to actually use these new ideas.

Microsft Access is a little of a strange beast. From the vantage of a SQL user, it is a dumbed down SQL implementation. But it has a very nice GUI that pure SQL engines like SQL Server or DB2 lack.

So most of the hacks in the book relate to GUI issues. But a minority pertain to the SQL limitations, compared to SQL Server. Access cannot make an outer join, for example. But hack 53 provides a workaround, just in case you need to do so.

Another group of hacks illustrate how Access can be used in combination with Microsoft Office. Microsoft has cleverly provided ways for Access users to integrate their tasks with Word and Excel. In one case, Excel can reorient your Access data. Or, more broadly, many of Excel's functions can be used within Access. These methods key off Microsoft's strengths in a mature Office suite.

As a database analyst for a large company, I oftentimes am confronted with small scale problems in Access. As always, there are a dozen different ways to solve them. Since I'm not 50 years old chock full of years of experience, the hacks here have saved me plenty of times. Once you read through it, you'll know when to apply the hack to a real world problem at work.
The way I try to solve problems is by not re-inventing the wheel and rather referencing an example with a given solution. This is where the real value of the book lies.
For example, a while back I had to automate a mass email using Outlook and Excel. I created a simple VB.NET app using COM to interface the two. One of the hacks in this book shows you how to automate the task using a given Access database of emails to create an object of an Outlook instance. You create an email object, set its properties (recipient, body, title, attachment, ...) and send it. This is a much more manageable solution I wish I had thought about.

When I picked up 'Access Hacks', I was doing so from the background of having used Access as the backend for my own web site, using ADO to connect with ASP as the server-side environment. I wanted to read 'Access Hacks' to learn some new techniques on how to increase performance with this setup but this is not what this book was intended to help you with.

If you use Access in a similar way to the environment that I just described, this book is not for you. This book basically assumes that you will be using Visual Basic to communicate with Access, and that you will be running queries with VBA. While this book does talk about doing many other things like importing data, sorting techniques, talking to a SQL Server, etc. I did not find this book very useful in my everyday world.

This doesn't mean that this book is bad.

From the VBA Access developer's perspective or someone that uses Access on a daily basis outside of a web setup, I think that you would find this book to be a nice companion and might pick up a few pointers on how you can make Access work smarter for you. The hacks are spread out in a clear, concise manner, and the author writes well enough, it just didn't help me out too much overall.

**** MILDLY RECOMMENDED

This is a fine set of 100 tips and tricks that will help you get the most out of Access. It's a good combination of simple tricks, and more advanced coding hacks. Involving everything for networks, to XML, to data crunching ideas. Even if you don't find exactly what you are looking for in terms of a solution you will benefit from seeing how the author approaches the problems.

Look through the table of contents, if you find ten or twenty that are in your areas of Access pain then

I've enjoyed several other Hacks titles - Excel and Word particularly. This one is not quite the same; it's like a combination of interface and SQL hacks. Granted, there are many useful tips and ideas for code - not always bulletproof as another user mentioned, but if you know what to do you'll be able to apply these ideas.

A lot of SQL-based hacks are self-evident to someone who has a solid SQL background; some interface features (such as user system tables, etc) are interesting ideas, but one might wish there were more of them. For instance, there are at least three examples of UNION statement in a query to concatenate SELECT statements... one would think this could be fitted into a single hack.

Most of the form hacks assume that bound forms are being used, so if you populate controls programmatically (DAO or ADO recordsets) much of this won't be applicable. Form design is an important topic, but very few control properties are covered. Multi-user section is pretty pointless - if you work with multi-user access applications, you probably already know most of this.

Certain hacks are duplicated; for instance, the one regarding "cleaner criteria" has basically two identical hacks back to back. Besides that and the UNION statement, there are a few other redundant hacks, retold by different authors.

On the bright side, there are several good ideas, or at least interesting ones that open some doors to making your own hacks. There are some user-interface ideas that are valuable (like the one that highlights the active control). All in all, I do read this book, but use only about 20-30% of it, of which a good deal I either knew already or could figure out on my own.

If you're new to Access/VBA development, this book will be a good reference. If you've been developing Access apps for a few years, there's not much in here you haven't already figured out for yourself.

Here is another useful book in the Hack series, chock full of good how-to-do-its, and right to the point. No fluff here, just find a hack that sounds appealing and see how it works. Mr. Bluttman has good insight to what makes database development more productive. Many of the hacks in this book are immediately useful in the business world like using a Confidential watermark, or having a way to randomly sort records, or even how to creatively sort the data in the lists. Don't miss the goodies either- putting web browsers on Access forms, and creating your own custom formatting. And much more. I highly recommend this book to Access users or developers at all levels.

The O'Reilly "Hacks" books are great, all of them. They each contain 100 hints and tips that intermediate to advanced users will find very useful. In fact, I don't believe that it's possible to pick up the book and not find something that you wish you had known earlier when you were working on some project.

This is not a book for beginners. It presumes that you have and have used Access. To get full advantage of the book, you also need to have at least a little bit of experience with Visual Basic. It is also not a beginner's level introduction to SQL, the language of databases that Access speaks. It talks about SQL in some of the hacks, but again the concept is something you should know.

Having said all this, the intermediate/advanced user will find this book to be absolutely filled with good information. The only complaints I have are that the book isn't big enough. I'd like to see a little more on SQL, and the differences between The Access version of SQL and the other versions that are out there. Also, I'd like to see some information about using Access with it's alternative back end database engine -- MSDE. Microsoft included this with Access. Which engine should I use, why?

Mr. O'Reilly, maybe this should be the idea behind a new book on Access.

I've only had this book a short time and have found more useful tips in this short book than in most of my other reference books. If you are proficient in Access, This is a must have!