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It has been a widely held belief that Microsoft Access has been neglected during many of the upgrades to Microsoft Office over the years. However, with the latest release, Microsoft Access 2007, many changes have been made to the interface and the database engine, and integration with Microsoft Outlook 2007 has been added in the formof Collect and Update Data via Email. It is also now possible, by downloading an add-in, to save objects to various formats, such as PDF.

One of the major changes you will see in Microsoft Access 2007 is the availability of template databases mostly directed at users. Templates are provided with Microsoft Office 2007, and additional templates can be downloaded and installed from the Office Online web site. Templates provide a way for users to get up and running right away with basic applications, whereas before when they opened Access, they were left looking at a blank screen. Many users wondering what to do next simply closed the application, never to return. In this chapter, we will look at the structure of Access database templates before I show you how to create your own.

In this chapter, we will be looking at the new menu interface in Access 2007, RibbonX. The goal with this chapter is to get you started creating your own menu system. The Ribbon will be the single most visible change to many developers and power users new to Access 2007, and by the end of this chapter, you will have gained experience that will provide a solid grounding in helping you to customize the menu system in Access 2007.

In this chapter, we look at another new feature of Microsoft Access 2007: the ability to automatically collect information by using a combination of Access 2007 and Microsoft Outlook 2007. This is mostly an interface-driven process at the moment, but even so it offers another useful tool for developers and power users who have a need to collect data within an organization. When I learned this feature had been added, I immediately began thinking about surveys for users of our services. Here was a nice, simple, almost automatic approach to this issue. Of course, you could still create a web-based form and have that input directly fed into a database table, but this approach is another option available to you.

If you have installed Northwind 2007, you may notice that almost all the VBA used in the application is based on VBA classes. This is a major departure from previous versions and so will be new to many Access 2007 users and developers. In this chapter, we will look at getting started with class programming in Access. Hopefully, it will set you on the path to more advanced VBA class programming, extending Microsoft Access 2007 even further than before.

One of the major advantages of Microsoft Access for developers and power users has long been the ability of Access to act as a Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment when working with SQL Server. This chapter looks at working with SQL Server as the back-end data store. We will look at upsizing to SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and have a look at some of the other features available as part of the SQL Server 2005 Express product including Reporting Services. Chapter 7 looks at working with SQL Server 2005 Express in more detail.

In this chapter, we look at working with SQL Server 2005 Express using Access Data Projects (ADPs) and linked tables. In Chapter 12, I move on to discussing working with two of the other tools in the SQL Server 2005 Express product set, Visual Web Developer Express and VB Express, in terms of using Access to build quick, efficient applications.

This chapter, devoted to the power user, provides a solid introduction to working with Microsoft Access 2007 via DAO. It also covers the new features introduced in Access 2007. Why power users? In my view, most professional developers reading this book will be well up to speed with DAO, and there is little that I can teach them here. In addition, many published titles, including the series (Sybex), cover DAO in a much more detailed fashion than I can in one chapter. For the professional developer, Chapter 13, which presents code you can steal, should more than make up for anything that may be missing here!

Microsoft Access 2007 will bring many changes to the developer and power user. One of the major focuses of this version is its interaction with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). It appears SharePoint will be receiving tremendous focus from Microsoft as it becomes the main data store for the information worker. In case you missed it, Access is aimed directly at this market—those individuals who process, add value to, and work with information as part of their day-to-day roles. It is my opinion that interaction with SharePoint will see increased functionality with each progressive release of Access from here on in, and it is worthwhile for Access developers to make themselves aware of the capabilities this software offers.

Chapter 9 provided an overview of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). In this chapter, we will again be looking at WSS, but this time concentrating on its interaction with Microsoft Access. From my own contact with developers, I believe many are still confused as to how WSS is designed to fit into the Access development world, and this chapter should help in answering that question. We will kick off by looking at linking to WSS lists and working with them in Access. Then we will move on to migrating an Access database (Northwind 2007) to WSS and look at working with WSS objects in code. However, most Access developers will not be working in code with WSS data; instead, they will be using built-in features of Access, queries, forms, and reports to build rich applications containing WSS list data.