Access™ 2007 VBA Bible: For Data-Centric Microsoft® Office Applications

Chapter 14. Creating Access Add-ins

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating Access menu add-ins

• Creating Access wizards

• Creating Access property builders

• Special considerations and troubleshooting for Access add-ins

Most of the sample databases for earlier chapters included objects from the Access 2007 Backup database, used to make incrementally numbered database backups. In order to use this feature in a database, you need to import several objects from Access 2007 Backup.accdb into the current database, and set a reference to the Microsoft Scripting Runtime library, which is a nuisance. It would be much more convenient to just have backup available in all your Access databases, say from a menu command.

An Access add-in will do just that, encapsulating a set of database objects and code into a single package that is available to all Access databases. In this chapter I use as an example an Access add-in (Extras 2007.accda, that includes an enhanced version of the Backup code (from basBackup in Access 2007 Backup.accdb), with some enhancements: a setup form for specifying the backup folder; and a set of objects and code that let you print out lists of tables or queries, and their fields, excluding those with user-specified prefixes—very handy for when you need to know which fields are in which tables during database development, or for documenting the database structure.

Note

The sample database for this chapter is Extras 2007.accda.

Note

If you are attempting to install an add-in in Access 2007 running ...