Part II Writing VBA Code to Exchange Data between Office Components
A Digression on Access Help
I
n my opinion, Access Help reached its highest point in Access 3.1, when it was provided in the
form of a Windows Help file, every bit of which was written specifically for the current version of
Access, and was available without an Internet connection. In successive versions of Access, Help
moved to the HTML format, which introduced the possibility of retrieving Help topics that were not
relevant to Access (say from the MSDN Library that came with VB 6.0), because properties, methods,
controls, and other objects may occur in many different Microsoft applications, although they may
not (usually don’t) work exactly the same. If you are trying to determine which properties of a Tab
control will work on an Access form, it isn’t much help if the Help topic you find is for a Tab control
on an Office UserForm or a VB form.Access 2007 Help is even less useful; it searches all of Office online (at least, if you are connected to
the Internet; otherwise, you won’t get any help at all), using a shamefully ineffective search engine. I
entered “Tab control” into the search box in the Access Help window and got the list of topics
shown in the following figure. Not a single one of them is relevant. One might think that Access
doesn’t support Tab controls, but of course that is not the case.FIGURE 9.6
The FileSystemObject Help file.