Credits
About the Author
Ken Bluttman has been hacking around with Access for years. Having honed his programming skills back when the PC was just becoming a household item, Ken found Access a joy to use, even back in earlier versions.
Besides Access, Ken excels at Excel and the other Office products, as well as SQL Server, web development, and VB/VB.NET development. No wonder he rarely sleeps.
Ken is also the author of Developing Microsoft Office Solutions (Addison Wesley) and Excel Formulas and Functions for Dummies (Wiley), as well as numerous print and web-based articles.
On the personal side, Ken is a musician and a nature lover. Have guitar, will travel to the woods. Ken lives in New York with his wife, son, dog, and several amphibians.
Visit Ken at his web site: http://www.bluttman.com.
Contributors
The following people contributed their hacks, writing, and inspiration to this book:
Steve Conklin is an independent software developer and the owner of Ultra D.N.T. (Development, Networks, and Training) Technology Consulting, located in Queens, New York. He specializes in Access, Visual Basic/VB.NET, and MS-SQL Server development, and is releasing a line of PocketPC applications for the mobile professional. Steve has written several articles for Access/VB/SQL Advisor magazine and he teaches Microsoft Windows and Office courses at a New York City community college. He is available for development work and can be reached at [email protected].
Steve Huff has been developing Access database applications for more than nine years. He has a computer science degree from Northern Kentucky University, where he is taking night courses toward a master’s degree in information systems. He has been developing Microsoft Office solutions as a consultant working for SARCOM for more than seven years. Steve lives in Kentucky with his wife, Melissa. You can reach him through his web site: http://www.huffs.us.
Kirk Lamb has been dabbling with Access for many years. Although his expertise is in boating, he knows a good database when he sees one. Kirk lives with his wife, Dill, in Washington state.
Andrea Moss first got involved with Access when she designed a system to track insurance claims. Since then, she has applied her artistic skills to designing layout and color schemes for various GUIs, including Access forms and web sites. Along the way, she has picked up a few Access tricks of her own.
Michael Schmalz works in banking and performs business and technology consulting in a variety of industries. He has been a technical editor for O’Reilly on Microsoft Office books. Michael has a degree in finance from Penn State. He lives with his wife and daughter in Pennsylvania.
Simon St.Laurent is a web developer, network administrator, computer-book author, and XML troublemaker living in Ithaca, New York. His books include XML: A Primer, XML Elements of Style, Building XML Applications, Cookies, and Sharing Bandwidth. He is a contributing editor to XMLhack.com and an occasional contributor to XML.com.
Margaret Levine Young has used small computers since the 1970s. She graduated from Unix on a PDP-11 to Apple DOS on an Apple II to DOS, Windows, and Unix on a variety of machines. She has done all kinds of jobs that involve explaining to people that computers aren’t as mysterious as they might think, including managing the use of PCs at Columbia Pictures, teaching scientists and engineers what computers are good for, and writing and cowriting computer manuals and books, including Understanding Javelin PLUS, The Complete Guide to PC-File, UNIX for Dummies, and The Internet for Dummies. Margy has a degree in computer science from Yale University and lives with her husband and two children in Vermont.
Acknowledgments
This book is a collaborative effort. My thanks go to the contributors for providing great hacks that I am sure you will enjoy as much as I have.
Special thanks and appreciation go to my editor, Mitch Tulloch. Mitch has stuck with me through the thick and thin of getting this project completed. His patience and perseverance have been awesome. Mitch would like to thank MTS Communications Inc. (http://www.mts.ca) for providing Internet services for hosting his web site (http://www.mtit.com).
Thanks to Michael Schmalz for tech-reviewing the material and keeping on my back about early binding versus late binding and other pertinent topics dear to our profession.
Thanks to Brian Sawyer and the great O’Reilly team. Thanks to all of you.
Thanks to my agent, Neil Salkind, and the Studio B team. Neil called me one day last year to see if I would be interested in writing Access Hacks. Of course! And that’s how I met Mitch Tulloch.
Thanks to the staff at Database Creations, Inc. (http://www.databasecreations.com) and FMS, Inc. (http://www.fmsinc.com) for providing copies of their outstanding products.
Last but not least, thanks to my wife Gayla and son Matthew. Working on a book is always stressful, and they have been real troopers in giving me space and time to complete the book. It’s cute to see a seven-year-old becoming such a computer pro. Often, Matthew will sit on my lap and watch what I am typing. Now he is an Access expert in his own right.