Gordon's Tech

Once upon a time database apps were priced and sold as a consumer product. Those were the days when computers were marketed as a replacement...

I needed to use Microsoft Access . I know what you’re thinking. You’re wrong. Yes, Access is a horrible old patchwork beast, but for some k...

It was only when I was recently forced to explore SQL subqueries (there's a reason people invented functions and even Entity SQL ) that ...

One of the stranger bits of my life is that I often do data manipulation using Microsoft Access 2003 in a Windows 2003 server VM.   It'...

While I wait to see if Pinboard can fix their Google Reader JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) import , and while I consider Google Reader Sh...

I know it's a dying technology, but I still get a lot of value out of Microsoft Access manipulation of data stored in Oracle tables. I h...

I think this may be the most obscure blog post I’ve ever written. I only write it because, even after I knew the answer, I couldn’t find thi...

Sometimes I have to use Access 2007. It’s always painful, but one of the worst agony comes because there are no object descriptions anymore....

Colleagues sometimes ask me about where to get a basic introduction to databases. My informatics students should be asking that, but they u...

I’ve seen software die. First the code gets crufty. Features pile on, but half of ‘em don’t work right. Old features might or might not wo...

I'm back using Access 2007 a year after I wrote about Microsoft Access 2007 reliability issues and suggested workarounds . In the interi...

When I was using Outlook 2003, I had a kludgy but reasonable way to get my corporate Outlook contacts to a primarily personal iPhone. I star...

A recent Apple Discussion Thread led me to take a new direction with Project Contacts . To put it mildly, there’s a lot of complexity in ...

I've been using Office 2007 on XP for a few months. My overall impressions are: Excel: few real changes, maybe slightly improved PowerPo...

The following TechRepublic list was written for Access 2007. My impression is that Access 2003 is becoming less reliable over time, probably...

This is disgusting. I’m sure I once knew better; maybe writing this up will help. A quick Google search tells me I’m not alone in my stupidi...

Microsoft Access has some curious behaviors with certain characters. They can be very hard to reference in searches or text operations. Mos...

Every time I ran “Make Table” in Access 2003 I got an “Invalid Argument” error message. Google found the explanation in seconds: Erro...

Using Microsoft Access is a bit like being in an Indiana Jones movie. There are dark and mysterious ancient temples to explore, hidden treas...

[This is written for the very few people who will ever try to do something like this this, and will Google for an explanation.] I'd say ...