Thank You The Smiley Coder!

For years now, I have been directing developers towards “The Smiley Coder”‘s exceptional Crash Reporter which was a tool you could integrate into your database to provide error reporting at the next level! Best of all, he had provided for FREE and even had a YouTube channel that included a supporting video.

Today, wanting to redirect someone in a forum to his exceptional tool, I went to his site to grab the URL only to discover it was no more!

I used to have it included in my add-ins post and even had a dedicated posting about the Crash Reporter (which I have now taken down).

So, I simply wanted to take a moment to thank The Smiley Coder for everything he did for the Access community for decades!!!

Wishing you all the best in whatever you have chosen to put your energies into now.

How-to Change a Table Field’s Data Type

I thought I’d share a function a created a while back to help a forum user out who wanted to update the data type of all matching table fields throughout their database.

So, yes, we could manually alter the data type via the Table Designer.

Obviously, we could perform such an operation using SQL using an SQL Statement following the basic syntax of:

ALTER TABLE [YourTableName] ALTER COLUMN [YourColumnName] YourDesiredDataType;

Therefore, a concrete example would be:

ALTER TABLE [Contacts] ALTER COLUMN [Active] INT;

But this will need to be performed manually for every matching field in every database table of interest. The goal was to create a VBA procedure to perform this command on every instance.

Easy enough!

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How-to Send E-mails Via Gmail Using The Google API

So this post goes hand in had with my post

How-to Send E-mails Via Outlook Using The Microsoft Graph API
Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, by now, you are aware of some fundamental changes coming to Outlook in the not too distant future, mainly the fact that it will cease to support any form of VBA! Now, many have tried to make Microsoft reverse course, understand the millions of solutions (Access, Word, Excel, …) that will instantaneously break with such a switch, but there has been no change in course.  Actually, per the usual, there has been little to no response whatsoever. This brings us to today’s post!  

and was an attempt to find a solution to Microsoft Outlook dropping all VBA support when the ‘New Outlook’ is implemented.

So please start by reviewing the article above as it covers aspects that I won’t repeat here: Basic Authentication Flow, Making Requests, JSON, …
 
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How-to Send E-mails Via Outlook Using The Microsoft Graph API

Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, by now, you are aware of some fundamental changes coming to Outlook in the not too distant future, mainly the fact that it will cease to support any form of VBA!

MAJOR Changes Coming To Microsoft Outlook
If you haven’t already heard, there are some MAJOR changes coming to Microsoft Outlook.  We will be getting a new ‘Outlook for Windows’ (2+ years out according to the video, but already available for opt-in testing) which will be replacing the existing mail apps (Mail, Outlook, Web Outlook, …). Some are also referring to it as ‘New Outlook’. Karl Donaubauer made a post which explains what we know so far:  

Now, many have tried to make Microsoft reverse course, understand the millions of solutions (Access, Word, Excel, …) that will instantaneously break with such a switch, but there has been no change in course.  Actually, per the usual, there has been little to no response whatsoever.

This brings us to today’s post!
 
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Microsoft Access Roadmap Updated!

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I went to the roadmap and saw that the Dev Team actually listened and updated the roadmap!

Was it the blog articles, the video, the feedback item and votes and comments from all of you or a combination of all of the above, but they actually did!!!

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Microsoft Access Bug Listing And Support

In my ongoing push to try and get the Microsoft Access Dev Team use and maintain their own web resources, today I wanted to touch upon their Fixes or workarounds for recent issues in Access. This page with not even an introductory paragraph as to the purpose it has, is supposed to be the place people turn to when seeking a listing of known bugs and thus get information regarding the problem including how to workaround the issue, or fix it.
 

Problems Abound

Like pretty much every Access site from Microsoft:

  • Feedback Portal
  • Fixes and workaround
  • Access Blog
  • …

this site (Fixes and workaround) has many, many problems.
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String Parsing Function Crashing Microsoft Access Bug

Software Bug

Just a service announcement, that as reported by Mike Wolfe, Microsoft has introduced a new bug caused by using common string parsing function (Instr, InStrRev, Replace, …) in a query’s where clause…

Consult his post on the matter for all the details and a link back to the original post on the subject.

Bug Alert: InStr() in WHERE Crashes Access
Using string expressions like InStr(), InStrRev(), and Replace() in the WHERE clause of a query can crash Access in certain recent releases.

Modern Web Browser Control Does Not Support URL Parameters When Working With Local Files

Software Bug

One more bug to add to the very long list of Modern Web Browser control bugs!!!

I was working on what I was hoping would be a nifty demo database to utilize for fun media capabilities that HTML5 offers and got it all working fine in Edge, on its own. Sadly, when I then tried to bring it over into Access I hit a wall.

After testing I discovered that Access will accept a Control Source like:

="https://msaccess/C:\Users\Daniel\Desktop\blank.html"
="https://msaccess/C:\Users\Daniel\Desktop\" & [FilePath] & ""

where [FilePath] returns ‘blank.html’ (and yes the ending & “” is required to get around another bug!)

So, simply accessing a file is possible. We knew that.

—

Where things then start to fall apart is when we try to pass parameters as part of the URL of any local files. Thus, passing parameters like demonstrated in the following 2 examples fail.

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