Microsoft Archives - Francesco Foti's weblog

How to decompose your Access application into files

Decomposing your Access application into external files can be useful for external process automation of source code, version control, or disaster recovery. An Access application is composed of objects of different nature, like forms, reports, queries, macros, code and class modules. Hopefully, you’re already splitting your solutions in separated databases. This for a good reason,… Continue reading How to decompose your Access application into files

Solving the Unicode, UTF8, UTF16 and Text Files conundrum in VBA

Understanding Unicode variants like UTF8 and UTF16 and how they impact your Office VBA development is not so straightforward. This post will guide thru the experience of reading a text file with VBA, explain some of the pitfalls you may encounter on this path when dealing with different text encodings and file formats. We’ll shed… Continue reading Solving the Unicode, UTF8, UTF16 and Text Files conundrum in VBA

Using national language support in Office with VBA

Localization demo application screenshot

If you need to handle multiple languages, get some specific regional settings, or do things like implement dynamic runtime language switching in your Microsoft Office solutions, you can leverage some additional help using the national language support Win32 API in VBA. Do you know why you have to use the US English date format when… Continue reading Using national language support in Office with VBA

Explaining the real time device detector Access demo database

In this post, we’ll examine and explain how the Access application that demonstrates a possible, real life use case, of the device detection feature of the AxDeviceDetector ActiveX server. See the downloads section below to download a copy of the database. Scenario We want to allow, let’s say, restaurant waiters or employees, to register their… Continue reading Explaining the real time device detector Access demo database

How to round a number to a five cents multiple in VB/A

In switzerland, we like rounding monetary numbers to 2 decimal places, with multiples of 5 for the fractional part. This is (probably) because our (physical) money has no “cent” coins, but we have 5 cents coins. That’s commonly called “5 cents” rounding. Example: 1.6777777 becomes 1.70 1.4444444 becomes 1.45 1.0333333 becomes 1.05 and so on.… Continue reading How to round a number to a five cents multiple in VB/A

How do I compute the length of the longest text for a date in Word ?

A Word document to compute the length of the longest text for a date in Word. Working on the layout of a Microsoft Word French and English versions of a document template with a customer, we were trying to determine where to position a tab, so that we had the document date appear on the… Continue reading How do I compute the length of the longest text for a date in Word ?

Comment connaître la longueur du plus long texte de la date du jour de l’année avec Word ?

Je travaillais hier matin avec un client sur son modèle de lettre Word. Sur ce modèle de lettre que l’on veut décliner en français et en anglais, la date est positionnée grâce à un tabulateur, vers le bord droit de la page. On a naturellement écrit la date du jour, lundi 18 janvier 2016, pour… Continue reading Comment connaître la longueur du plus long texte de la date du jour de l’année avec Word ?

Tracking active directory user logon/off for the just cause – Part 1

Doing some work remotely, typically using a VPN to access our customer(s) network, or some other type of remote access software (like TeamViewer) is unavoidable when we’re maintaining our customers infrastructures. The recurring problem I encounter and that initially got me started on tracking user logons and logoffs is to determine a convenient moment where… Continue reading Tracking active directory user logon/off for the just cause – Part 1

How to get the same result in VBA and in PHP computing a CCITT CRC checksum

I was working last week on a Microsoft Access application and I needed to get some data from a webserver running Apache/PHP. Exchanging data with the server was easy, the WinHTTP and XML ActiveX library components are really cool and easy to use for that. But then I came unto some unexpected trouble when I… Continue reading How to get the same result in VBA and in PHP computing a CCITT CRC checksum

Share the Clipboard with VBA and the Windows API

Accessing the clipboard in Windows becomes quite tricky in VBA, particularly if you have to stay 32 and 64 bits compatible. Here’s my compilation of portable routines, inspired by MSDN, Internet scraping and good sense. First the Declares section (I know, it pours out of the frame on the right, just select and copy the… Continue reading Share the Clipboard with VBA and the Windows API

Category: Microsoft