Microsoft Access 204 Intermediate Access 4 Designing a Letter Writer, Access Macros, Events, OnDblClick Event, Refresh Macro, Much More. 65 Minutes.

In this class we will begin designing our Letter Writer system. With our letter writer, we'll be able to actually type letters and other correspondence into our contact management system and print them out in a letter or memo format to mail or fax to our customers.

We'll begin by developing a query that only shows the current contact record. We'll use this query to feed our report that lets us print out the letter. We'll use the technique we learned in a previous class to get the Contact ID value from the open contact form.

Now that we have the query built, we can build the Contact Letter Report. We'll format this report to look like a normal letter, with the customer's name and address and the body of the letter ready to mail.

Next we'll place a Print As Letter button on our form so that we can print the letter right up.

We'll learn about what it means when records are Dirty - or in the process of being edited, and how this hurts our database... we can't directly print a letter now until we manually save the data to the table. We'll need something more powerful.

In lesson three, we'll begin to learn about Macros. We'll make a couple of real simple macros just to teach you how they work - and how we can make them repeat automated tasks. We'll make a simple macro just to beep at you.

Then we'll make a macro that's a little more complicated. It will open a form, beep, open a table, and then tell you "I'm done now, Master!"

Next, we'll make a macro that will allow us to open up the current customer record from the contact form. We will assign this macro to the On Dbl Click event (on double-click) in our customer combo box. This means the user just has to double-click on the combo box to open up that customer. Real powerful stuff!

Now that we've learned about macros, we can actually make a macro to refresh the current contact record before printing it - assuring us that the data is saved in the table before printing. We'll learn how to make a command button that runs a macro.

Once we're done with the macros, we'll actually get into making our letter report look good. We'll start by making some new fields to concatenate our name fields and address fields together.

We'll learn how to automatically adjust the vertical spacing of fields on our forms and reports.

We'll talk about the margins of the page, and making sure you set the report at it's optimal width.

We'll put the company logo and our return address in the page header...

This class begins to take our contact management system and use it for correspondence as well. We'll do more with this in coming classes - including a mass-mailing form and letter as well. We also begin to learn about Macros, which are the stepping stone to Visual Basic programming. Don't miss this course!

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