By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Access & VBA SIGs We have had some pretty interesting SIGS recently where a member presented a project on which they would like some help getting started. The last was a cookbook in Access of interest to Jim Purcell. He has presented us with a number of interesting problems to solve. Next meeting we will be working on one offered by John Witmer involving keeping track of employee accounts.

Windows Scripting Host At our last VBA meeting, Merle Nicholson introduced us to the Windows Scripting Host and gave examples of simple scripts which accomplish some very useful tasks. It really got my attention, and I plan on seeing what I can do with such scripts. Perhaps in a future newsletter I will include a few for you to try. They are just text files that you double click on to run.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) At that same VBA SIG, I presented VBA code that would allow you to export a Microsoft Access table to an XML file and also code to import an XML file in a specific format to a table in Access. This is useful in Access 97 and 2000 but not in 2002, since Access 2002 can both import and export information in the XML format. By the way, XML is a platform independent language for describing data. In XML, our membership data would look like:

Where each block

<members>
………………

</members>

contains one member’s data, and there would be as many such blocks as we have members. This is the simplest form of XML document. Of course, things can get much more complicated.

XML and Amazon.Com Shortly after I did the XML presentation in the VBA SIG, Amazon sent me an email to the effect that they were testing out a new XML interface to their database that would allow developers to directly query their database. With the information they gave me, with what little I already knew about XML, and with some help from the developers’ discussion forum at Amazon , I was able to make it all work. The result is an additional link to Amazon.Com at our home page, http://www.tpcug.org, that allows you to directly query the Amazon database without ever leaving the TPCUG site-and as before the TPCUG will get 5% of any purchases you may decide to make at no extra charge to you. Give it a try. u