Adventures in MS Access 2007

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I have way too many books in my house.

One of the challenges of having too many books, is that sometimes (and with increasingly alarming frequency) I end up buying the same book twice!

So I decided to create a simple database using Access 2007.

Creating the schema was fairly trivial. It consisted of three tables:

Book (BookID, Title)

Authors (AuthorID, FirstName, LastName)

AuthorBookMap (AMID, BookID, AuthorID)

Once I got my tables, I wanted to create, what I thought was a fairly simple data-entry mechanism:Imagine a button: AddNewBook

Which would take me to a wizard:

ask for book title

ask for author (s)

Which would then conclude with the action of

update book and author table and add authorbookmap entry.

Turns out that this simple activity is non trivial, and is turning into an illuminating, and informative experience into the very nature of how MS Apps are put together.

Because, for whatever reason, the company that popularized or pioneered wizards did not think that having wizard creation tools in the most popular database on the planet was a necessity.

I am now struggling to understand how you use VB 6.5 (Visual Basic 6.5) to create a wizard. And I believe it is possible, but the complexity is staggering!

3 thoughts on “Adventures in MS Access 2007”

  1. Michael Rubin

    Databases are awesome. I think I have spent a couple of years in my professional and non professional life building apps with them.

    I you are interested in projects that catalog your books out there I cannot help but recommend these three:

    http://www.librarything.com/ – For the web
    http://www.delicious-monster.com/ – For the Mac
    http://www.imediaman.com/products/mediaman/product-overview.html – For windows

    Mediaman is a complete ripoff of Delicious but what is cool is that it runs on windows which I know you are a big fan of.

    In any case if you buy a cheap bar code reader you can enter in all your books with blinding speed!

    Reply ↓
  2. Anawat

    Try Filemaker or a slimdown “Bento”.

    I believe that it even comes with template that will let you manage
    your library without any programming.

    Reply ↓

  3. Pingback: Day to Day Nonesense » Who owns my data?

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