Access needs a Search View

By Adam Cogan in Access 0 Comment

At the moment there are the Form and Continuous views. Access needs another view that doesn’t have the navigation buttons at the bottom but instead should have a search form that is bound to table. This allows for easier and more intuitive navigation of large data sources.

We know there is existing functionality to search fields, but the interface is not intuitive and robust enough.

Figure: Bad example - Access' built in Find Dialog - Not intuitive

Figure: Bad example – Access’ built in Find Dialog – Not intuitive

Figure: Good Example - A Search Form to view data from a Table - Allows for better queries

Figure: Good Example – A Search Form to view data from a Table – Allows for better queries

Linking Tables to XML Files

By Adam Cogan in Access, Office 0 Comment

Microsoft Access should support the ability to use an XML file as a linked table, just like it supports linking a table to a SQL backend.

Further, if they include an XML parser it would be easy to implement a web service linked table.

For example, a supplier may publish their price list as a DataSet returned from a WebService. By entering the path to the WebService then selecting the function, Access could then import this as a linked table.

Figure: Access supports links to many data sources, but not XML.

Figure: Access supports links to many data sources, but not XML