Office 2010 Home And Stude/nt Key Meet the Access

Today’s guest contributors are Kerry Westphal, Chris Downs, Krunal Sheth, James Rivera, and Michael Tucker—from the macro designer feature crew.
The Macro Designer is a revamped editor that allows you to automate repetitive tasks; wire together forms and reports to create productive UI; and implement business logic in Access databases. We will talk more about business logic next week when we start the conversation about data macros.
Probably the best way to introduce this feature is a demo:

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The goal for the redesign was to help business users and developers be more productive, reduce coding errors, and create robust applications. There are five key usability improvements that support this goal:
Increase developer productivity with features such as the action catalog,Office 2010 Pro Key, IntelliSense for expressions,Buy Office 2010, keyboard accessibility, and copy/paste. Readable program flow and logic. Allow for more complex logic execution with support for nested IF/Else/Else If. Code faster through reuse of existing macros in your database. Share via email, newsgroup posts, blogs,Office 2010 Home And Stude/nt Key, and code sample web sites through XML.
As you can see—the new layout looks more like code. The Expand Actions, Collapse Actions, Expand All, and Collapse All commands helps readability as you move around macros. Here is an example drill-through macro in Access 2007:
Now,Office 2007 Professional, here is the same macro in collapsed view the new designer:

Here is a view with just the actions collapsed:

Here is what the macro looks like fully expanded—notice it reads like code:

Quick Tips
Error handling. One of the first things I do when someone asks me to help them debug their macro is add the On Error macro action to the top of the macro. I put a MessageBox at the bottom of the macro with a message that shows the error description:
Show all actions. By default the Action Catalog and Add New Action combo box show actions that execute in non-trusted databases. To see all actions (including the widely popular SetValue) click the Show All Actions command.
Submacros. Submacros are essential if you have lots of snippets of logic that is frequently reused and should only be modified in one place. This concept maps to the Macro Name column in the old macro designer.

Macro Groups. There is a new program flow construct called Group. This makes it easy to put macros into a group that expand/collapses together.
Action catalog search. The Action Catalog search box not only looks at the action name but also includes the action description. Search for “Query” to see what I mean… It also includes ApplyFilter, GoToRecord, and ShowAllRecords.
MessageBox rename. We renamed MsgBox to MessageBox but you can still type in MsgBox to add the action.
In this database. The “In this database” node in the Action Catalog lists all the macros in your database. Drag and drop of database level macros creates a RunMacro(MacroName) action. You can then use the dropdown to call Submacros.

Drag the Macro Library to create a RunMacro action with a dropdown of sub-macros:

If you drag an embedded macro it always creates a copy as embedded macro cannot be invoked from another macro.

Hot Keys
Expand and collapse code blocks with the Left and Right arrow keys. The ALT + Up and ALT + Down key strokes moves the selected action up and down. CTRL + drag copies the actions when you need to quickly duplicate logic.
Quick comments. Enter “//” followed by text will create a comment with from the text.

Tool tips for collapsed actions. Hover over a collapsed action displays a super tool tip with all the arguments:
Argument quick tips. Hover over an argument provides useful tool tips. Here is the Where Condition argument for the OpenForm action:
Insert IF Block. The right click menu has some useful commands to help organize code and insert IF statements without using the Action Catalog.
Convert to VBA. Even with all the improvements to the macro designer, many developers will still want to convert macros written by business users into code. Open the form in design view and use the Convert Form’s Macro to Visual Basic command.
Next,Office 2010 Download, we will blog about how IntelliSense speeds up development and reduces errors.
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