Access Hacks: Tips & Tools for Wrangling Your Data

I've only had this book a short time and have found more useful tips in this short book than in most of my other reference books. If you are proficient in Access, This is a must have!

The O'Reilly "Hacks" books are great, all of them. They each contain 100 hints and tips that intermediate to advanced users will find very useful. In fact, I don't believe that it's possible to pick up the book and not find something that you wish you had known earlier when you were working on some project.This is not a book for beginners. It presumes that you have and have used Access. To get full advantage of the book, you also need to have at least a little bit of experience with Visual Basic. It is also not a beginner's level introduction to SQL, the language of databases that Access speaks. It talks about SQL in some of the hacks, but again the concept is something you should know.Having said all this, the intermediate/advanced user will find this book to be absolutely filled with good information. The only complaints I have are that the book isn't big enough. I'd like to see a little more on SQL, and the differences between The Access version of SQL and the other versions that are out there. Also, I'd like to see some information about using Access with it's alternative back end database engine -- MSDE. Microsoft included this with Access. Which engine should I use, why?Mr. O'Reilly, maybe this should be the idea behind a new book on Access.

The only reason I didn't give 5 stars is because I haven't gotten into the book yet. But I have read other "Hacks" books and have loved them. If you are a real MSXL buff or MSAccess buff, the "Hacks" books are for you. Buy one today.

If you're new to Access/VBA development, this book will be a good reference. If you've been developing Access apps for a few years, there's not much in here you haven't already figured out for yourself.

This is a fine set of 100 tips and tricks that will help you get the most out of Access. It's a good combination of simple tricks, and more advanced coding hacks. Involving everything for networks, to XML, to data crunching ideas. Even if you don't find exactly what you are looking for in terms of a solution you will benefit from seeing how the author approaches the problems.Look through the table of contents, if you find ten or twenty that are in your areas of Access pain then

Here is another useful book in the Hack series, chock full of good how-to-do-its, and right to the point. No fluff here, just find a hack that sounds appealing and see how it works. Mr. Bluttman has good insight to what makes database development more productive. Many of the hacks in this book are immediately useful in the business world like using a Confidential watermark, or having a way to randomly sort records, or even how to creatively sort the data in the lists. Don't miss the goodies either- putting web browsers on Access forms, and creating your own custom formatting. And much more. I highly recommend this book to Access users or developers at all levels.

I've enjoyed several other Hacks titles - Excel and Word particularly. This one is not quite the same; it's like a combination of interface and SQL hacks. Granted, there are many useful tips and ideas for code - not always bulletproof as another user mentioned, but if you know what to do you'll be able to apply these ideas.A lot of SQL-based hacks are self-evident to someone who has a solid SQL background; some interface features (such as user system tables, etc) are interesting ideas, but one might wish there were more of them. For instance, there are at least three examples of UNION statement in a query to concatenate SELECT statements... one would think this could be fitted into a single hack.Most of the form hacks assume that bound forms are being used, so if you populate controls programmatically (DAO or ADO recordsets) much of this won't be applicable. Form design is an important topic, but very few control properties are covered. Multi-user section is pretty pointless - if you work with multi-user access applications, you probably already know most of this.Certain hacks are duplicated; for instance, the one regarding "cleaner criteria" has basically two identical hacks back to back. Besides that and the UNION statement, there are a few other redundant hacks, retold by different authors.On the bright side, there are several good ideas, or at least interesting ones that open some doors to making your own hacks. There are some user-interface ideas that are valuable (like the one that highlights the active control). All in all, I do read this book, but use only about 20-30% of it, of which a good deal I either knew already or could figure out on my own.

When I picked up 'Access Hacks', I was doing so from the background of having used Access as the backend for my own web site, using ADO to connect with ASP as the server-side environment. I wanted to read 'Access Hacks' to learn some new techniques on how to increase performance with this setup but this is not what this book was intended to help you with.If you use Access in a similar way to the environment that I just described, this book is not for you. This book basically assumes that you will be using Visual Basic to communicate with Access, and that you will be running queries with VBA. While this book does talk about doing many other things like importing data, sorting techniques, talking to a SQL Server, etc. I did not find this book very useful in my everyday world.This doesn't mean that this book is bad.From the VBA Access developer's perspective or someone that uses Access on a daily basis outside of a web setup, I think that you would find this book to be a nice companion and might pick up a few pointers on how you can make Access work smarter for you. The hacks are spread out in a clear, concise manner, and the author writes well enough, it just didn't help me out too much overall.**** MILDLY RECOMMENDED

This book covers other side of Access from another books.