Access Training Question

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

Many of you have assisted me in a project I worked on previously. My newest
project has shown me that I really need some in depth training on VBA and
writing code in Code Builder. Unfortunately, I am working on a new project
that has put me up a wall in the last week. I picked up Michael Vine's
Access VBA for the Absolute Beginner. Unfortunately, I am not getting out of
it what I need.

Any help or fingers in the right direction are appreciated.

Thanks,
Jim
 
A book on Visual Basic 6.0 will teach you VBA.
I also have a book called "Access 2000 Developers Handbook, Desktop Edition"
by SYBEX, written by Getz, Litwin and Gilbert that is excellent (Its about 3
inches thick). There may be an updated edition. Check Amazon books.

-Dorian.
 
Thank you for your response Dorian.

Luckily, I work for one of the worlds largest book distributors and I can
track down books with ease. I did find that there is an Access 2002
Developers Hndbk. by the authors you listed. I may have to buy that one on
my own since I have had my boss buy 2 books for the department already out of
our department budget.

I guess the one concern I have is that I am starting to feel like everyone
is self taught and has learned straight out of a book. Is that really the
case? Is that all I am left to do in terms of learning?

Help and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Jim
 
There are classes available for Access, depending on your location.
Also, you might consider trying to find the local Access User's
Group. Denver has one (www.daaug.org).

Any VB6 class or book will also be a benefit, if you can't find an
Access one.

The last thing to consider is to hire an Access consultant for a short
time to both complete your project, and teach you.

I'm the type of person that if you give me a good book and a project
to complete, I will complete it and learn as I go. Development is
very logical, and if you are not inclined to learn, then it will be a
long, ardous road.


Chris
 
TY Chris. I am outside of Nashville, TN and I will take your advice on
looking for a local group. I have struck out in terms of training classes so
far.

I function the same way you do. I received an introduction to Access by
someone in the company showing us how to run queries from our data warehouse.
I had already started building forms prior to the end of their 3 part class.
I like to get a project and dive head first into it. I love learning and
understand concept. I have just hit a wall on what I need to tell Access to
do to make the data go from point A to B. *sigh*

Jim
 
That said:
TY Chris. I am outside of Nashville, TN and I will take your advice on
looking for a local group. I have struck out in terms of training classes so
far.

I function the same way you do. I received an introduction to Access by
someone in the company showing us how to run queries from our data warehouse.
I had already started building forms prior to the end of their 3 part class.
I like to get a project and dive head first into it. I love learning and
understand concept. I have just hit a wall on what I need to tell Access to
do to make the data go from point A to B. *sigh*

Jim
Click to expand...

You might try asking your question here. There are some very
knowledgeable and helpful people here that may be able to help.
Most are very patient :-) It helps to give as much detail as possible
and the end product you hope to construct. Keep the questions specific
and try and tackle your project one small step at a time.

gls858
 
I learned by taking an online course and developing a simple application at
the same time (a company timesheet). I did have a book and access to the
online HELP (much underused) and these and other forums. I was already a
programmer of many years experience in various languages.
I still learn something every time I tackle a new Access project.

-Dorian
 
There are classroom courses available. Be prepared to travel to the
presenters locations and pay upwards of $2k for a one week course.
Some used to have traveling road shows but I'm not sure how much of
that still goes on. MCW is one source of such training. They also
sell some pretty pricey CD/DVD based training. Ken Getz is one of
their authors and presenters.

The Access 2002 Developer's Handbook by Getz et alia was their last
edition. I highly recommend it. It covers most of the fundamentals
and would miss out only the new functionality in 2003 & 2007 - mostly
user interface changes.

Getz is also co-author of the VBA Developer's Handbook. It is also
worth having. As you are probably aware, VBA is now the common
language across all of the MS Office applications and Visual Basic
itself (pre- dotnet). What changes is the object model and the
attached methods and properties. Not too long ago each MS Office
platform had its own dialect of BASIC.

John Vinson recommends a tutorial by Crystal ??. If you google these
Access groups on his name and the word "tutorial" you should be able
to find it.

You've already gotten some pretty good advice and made a pretty good
observation: many of the scarred old veterans responding to queries
in these newsgroups are self-taught. Job pressures kept us out of
classrooms and burning the midnight keyboards.

Much as the creation and maintenance of documents is a pain, I endorse
the creation of formal documents, at least: Problem Statement,
Solution Statement/Product Specification and Functional Specification
and at least a preliminary design and implementation plan (not a
schedule). That much will help you to stay on track and avoid
"feature creep" and other sins. It's often the lack of these
documents that is the cause of problems people report as "Access
problems". The problem is hat they haven't prepared themselves to do
the job and they're trying to force the tool (Access) to provide a
solution that they haven't defined nor quantified.

There is another old saw regarding Access that will always be true:
"Get the data right and you can build a cost effective and
maintainable application".

Get tools to help you do your job:

Find and Replace is a shareware product available from Rickworld.com
I've been using it since Access 2.0 and gladly pay the license.
There are others.

MZtools is a great utility for painlessly providing a procedure
document skeleton and standardized error handling. It's freeware but
they welcome contributions.

I think you're beyond the newbie stage but I'll recommend the
newsgroups GettingStarted and TablesDesign. They're great for lurking
until you could answer most of the questions yourself.

A terrific resource is www.mvps.org/access It has lots of very
relevant Access lore.

HTH
 
Crystal's tutorial can be found through Allen Browne's site:
http://allenbrowne.com/tips.html
It is in the Table Design section of Tips for Casual Users. There is some
other good stuff in that section, too. Also, at the left side of the web
page is a Links link, which also leads to tutorials and a wealth of other
information on all levels.
 
The book that mscertified suggested is by far my favorite (favourite for you
foreigner :); but, I think it may be a bit advanced. It cover more technique
and method than it does the basics of VBA. I personally don't know of a
really good beginners level intro to VBA (That is why I am working on one).
I suggest you find a good bookstore that has a lot of technical publications
and spend some time flipping through pages of VBA related books until you
find one that speaks to you.

IMHO, to learn VBA from the beginning, you need to ignore object references
and events and focus on how the language works. Once you understand the
basics of the language, how it relates to objects and events will make a lot
more sense.

You also must understand the when you say "Access", you are talking about a
package that includes all the components to complete a relational database
application. In another world, you may use VB6 to create the forms, SQL
Sever to house the data and write SQL statments to manipulate the data, and
Crystal Reports to create reports.

Access provides the VB6 and Crystal Reports part, but Jet substitutes for
the SQL Server part. So even though you have a complete kit with Access,
you have to understand when you are dealing with Jet and when you are dealing
with the Access part.

Keep coming to this site with questions. There is no better place to learn.
Also, here are a couple of links with really good information.

http://allenbrowne.com/tips.html

http://www.mvps.org/access/
 
Back
Top