Book Review: Fixing Access Annoyances

Fixing Access Annoyances: How to Fix the Most Annoying Things about Your Favorite Database
by Phil Mitchell and Evan Callahan

OK, I admit it. I still support a number of applications written using MS Access. Some I origianlly wrote, and some were written by others. I certainly prefer "Real" databases, but at the end of the day, what counts is what folks will pay for.

If you still do work with Access, Fixing Access Annoyances is a worthwhile investment, both in time and money.

As with many technical books these days, you could read this book cover to cover (as I did), or you could use the book as a reference when confronted with annoyances as you work with Access applications.

Many of the fixes in this book were not news to me, but then again, I have been programming Access since at least the version 1 beta, and was once a part of a group known as Access Insiders. Even so, there were a number of things I learned.

The book is broken up into chapters that cover areas like "Forms", "Queries", "Reports", etc. In many cases, the annoyances are really what most folks (except the Access team, apparently) would consider bugs. In many cases, these annoyances have existed for multiple versions of Access, and will unlikely be completely fixed in future versions.

Many fixes do not require code, but rather require configuration changes in Access. Where appropriate, the authors do drop to VBA code to fix annoyances. In many cases, either free or modest cost utilities are also mentioned as possible fixes. In one or two cases, the authors point you to another book (for instance, the Access Developers Handbook) when the code to fix the annoyance is very long.

So, if you are a longtime Access programmer, or a developer from another world suddenly thrown into Access support, this is the book for you.

Posted by Douglas Reilly at 10:08 AM  Permalink