You might be surprised by this, but you can still back convert Access 2007 forms, reports and modules to Access 97! (Why is another matter, of course, but let’s presume that you need to…)

OK, first of all, you need to export them to text, which is explained here in far more detail than I care to explain it.

So now, when you fire up Access 97, and try and convert them by running this line:

Application.LoadFromText acForm, "YourFormName", \
 "C:\Temp\Form_frmTest.txt"

It fails, right? Well, you can easily change that by editing the text file itself… (more…)

It may be a bit late for this, but here’s eight things Microsoft could do NOW that would dramatically make my – and judging by some of the web searches I’ve done, lots of other people’s – experience of Office better. (more…)

Lotus Smartsuite is, in my opinion, underrated.  (And possibly overpriced, deepending where you buy it from, but that’s a whole different ball game.)

If I didn’t have MS Office (which, in fairness, I haven’t updated since Office 97), I’d live.  I wouldn’t have Access, but OpenOffice.org Base is getting better all the time and will connect to Access databases.  Besides which,  I use OOo for most of my word processing, all of my spreadsheets and as I almost never do any presentations, the likes of PowerPoint, Impress and Freelance Graphics aren’t really that important to me (I had to look up the name of that last one, by the way, which shows how little I use it.)  Since all my email is now online in GMail,  I don’t really use Thunderbird or Outlook except to look back on old email (some so old it’s still in Calypso, or Courier as it’s now called.)

This said, Lotus 1-2-3 is still impressive, and WordPro is still good.  But for me, Lotus Organizer is the main thing in the suite that I use on a regular basis.

Organizer lets you like everything to everything else, kind of like a mini-CRM application for your desktop.   It doesn’t do email – which isn’t important to me as I said above.  But it handles appointments, contacts, to do lists, anniversaries…  If you put an anniversary in, it puts reminders in for you.  Alternatively, you can just put the birthday in on a contact – and then it puts the anniversary in for you, then puts the reminders in…

Organizer just works.  And it works very well.  I got my copy of SmartSuite free with a motherboard a few years ago and haven’t done much with it until recently, and I’m impressed with Organizer.

And before I finish, WordPro and 1-2-3 have an impressive converter suite included with them, and handle many diverse formats better than a lot of other programs.  I used to work at an organisation that used SmartSuite to convert documents for a rollout of Microsoft Office because its converters were better than those supplied with Office…

So as I say.  Useful, usable, underused, and underrated.  A shame.  They’re good products, and worth the money.  And that from someone who usually prefers open source and freeware…

(Before you ask, I am not, and never have been, affiliated with IBM or Lotus Software)