Ever wonder what a developer running a sole proprietorship does? Here’s a little snapshot of my life this week.

This week i’ve been up to a couple of things:

1. I’ve updated a client to provide a button to their navigation to open a particular query.
2. Continued to work on a routine that exports data to Excel, migrating it away from Active Cell references and toward much faster batch updating – trying to update batches of cells all at once rather than one painful call at a time.
3. Changed a report to show a group of fixed customer records instead of a single customer at a time using the IN clause in the query filter.

One of my clients also wanted to know if they could automate a compact and repair of their front end / back end. The topic has a lot of caveats.

1. You cannot compact and repair the active front end from code located in the front end, you can manually do this or update the auto compact on close option to have Access do this for you.
2. You CAN compact and repair any non current Access database with code that you can open with exclusive access (required for compacting and repairing) as long as it is a separate database.

I also spent a lot of time copying data between databases and cross referencing CSV files with records to make sure they were being imported properly and interfacing with other vendors to get the correct data into the CSV files. I’ve been pretty busy and having a hard time keeping up writing in the last few weeks.

Couple these projects with doing sales calls, time entry, and producing and sending invoices, it’s pretty easy to rack up the hours. I do make sure I’m also leaving time for non-work related items like 20 – 30 minute workouts each day, spending time with my family, and a meeting or two for outside activities like church. So there you go.

I’d recommend keeping track of what you’re doing every once in a while. You might find some things you don’t need to be doing or some things you want to add!