"Larry Linson" <bo*****@localhost.not> wrote in
news:HH********************@nwrddc01.gnilink.net:
I believe Access 2002, with the current 3 Service Packs is better
than Access 2000 with its current 3 Service Packs. From those much
more knowledgeable about ADPs than I, I understand that the area
of ADP (Access Projects) are one of the major areas of
improvement. There are a good many others... I think a little
searching at http://www.microsoft.com/office would lead you to a
list.
The good news is that, with those 3 Service Packs/Releases, Access
2000 _is_ usable and relatively stable, not nearly so buggy as it
was earlier in its lifecycle.
So far as I can tell, Access 2K as worked OK since SR1a. The later
service releases neuter Outlook attachments in ways that most of my
clients have avoided (until recently). Basically, nowadays, I can't
email any attachments to any of my clients who use Outlook for
email. This is a ridiculous situation, of course.
On the question of A2K2, I spent my first time with it yesterday,
and I must say I'm simply underwhelmed. It's nice to be able to open
subreports/subforms independently, but it would be better if I could
set that as the default, instead of having to do extra work for it.
The main thing that annoyed me about it is that the monolithic save
in A2K2 is slower than A2K. Now, this may have been because the file
I was working on includes a number of graphics, but I've worked in
20MB MDBs before, and never been annoyed by the save time (except in
the original A2K).
The printer object is a nice thing, but there's a fatal bug that
seems to me to make it a necessity to use it, in that report
settings changed in preview mode get saved even when you don't
explicitly save them:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;282363
The project I was brought in on was to try to fix a printing
problem, and it seems there's no way around it, especially because
custom printer properties specific to a specific driver do not seem
to be exposed through the printer object.
Yes, it's easier than parsing those arrays, but it certainly wasn't
a silver bullet for a runtime project converted from A97 that then
developed the inability to print properly.
The client is going to abandon Access for this project because of
it. Of course, if they'd just gotten the SageKey scripts for the old
A97 runtime, they'd have had no such problems, but their developer
didn't know about that until after they'd made the commitment to the
conversion.
It does raise the question for me: why do I know about things that
I've never used (I've never once created a runtime distribution)?
It's all because I read this newsgroup. This provides a real
competitive advantage, because I know the landscape even of those
areas of Access in which I lack firsthand experience.
--
David W. Fenton
http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
dfenton at bway dot net
http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc