office 97 access macros and modules

[Dan]

Tom,

Interesting you should have the same perspective I had
about 5 years ago. My feeling is macros,in particular, are
a very underrated feature of Access. I do not consider
myself a 'power' Access developer, but within the current
environment at the technical school where I work, Access
has become a very intergral part of how we manage
maintenance and distribution of the data related to the
student record system we use on an AS400. We've found
macros provide a centralized location from which we
literally can do most everything. The flexiblity and
scalability provided by macros allows performing almost
any task we require now and can imagine in the foreseeable
future. Currently, using ODBC, we control events in our
SQL Server 7 database, DB2 AS400 database, and any Access
database. These events range from moving data from the
AS400 to SQL Server using DTS, executing COBOL programs on
the AS400 to perform updates, extract data from DB2 which
is then moved to the Access database again via ODBC,
etc,etc,etc all within the macro. Not to mention, all
these events can be conditionally performed.

If you think you will be building applications
requiring 'job control'(which is what I feel macros really
provide), take a close look at macros, I think you will
eventually acquire considerable appreciation for the
functionality the Access development team has built into
this hidden jewel.

Hope this helps,
Dan

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

All of the features you attribute to Macros also apply to VBA modules, but
using VBA modules also lets you include error trapping. With the exception
of creating short-cut keys, I don't believe there's anything you can do in a
macro that you can't do in VBA.