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A Rapid Development Framework for Microsoft Access
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The importance of being disciplined
When I began my business doing consulting, the freedom was great. I could do anything I wanted whenever I wanted. No one was there to look over my shoulder to tell me what to do. I knew I had to deliver things, but it seemed that was always a job for "Future Jon"....
SDOpenAI Access Add In – controlling context through selecting text.
I have been playing a little bit with the SDOpenAI Access Add In. In particular testing what context is being sent to the API in different situations. When your cursor has nothing selected, the general chat context will send the current line your cursor is on. When...
What are the options for OpenAI access? (as of May 2025)
The SDOpenAI Access plugin uses the OpenAI API to provide "tokens" which means the question or prompts that you use, and return results (again measured in tokens) from the OpenAI system. You are charged by the number of millions of tokens you provide to the AI which...
Access VBA AI experiments – Full version of SDOpenAI Access Plugin installed
So far, I have the SDOpenAI Access Plugin reinstalled and purchased and entered in the license number. Good deal. I was able to create a function header with a descriptive line of Public Function GetDateXDaysPriorToToday(days As Single) As Date with a single for days...
Preparing to use AI for programming
So, I am beginning again to move into a place where I will attempt to use some AI tools. What will this do for me? Here are some of the things I'm hoping it will help with: Allowing me to delegate simple coding tasks like functions and subroutines. Get recommendations...
Microsoft Access customer form logging strategy
I have a form a customer wanted to track changes in. Not all changes, just the "important" ones which is a business definition. No problem. So what was my approach? I built a class object that could store the original state of a recordset, then compare that with a...
The HCI Way™ – A Dive into Agile Project Management and Sales!
Hi folks, I got a few responses to my message yesterday, so here's a summarized version of my sales, delivery, and follow up strategies for you to take a look at. I'll tell you up front that I follow this very poorly, but it is what I intend to do from the finding and...
Why I think hourly billing is nuts
Hourly billing uses hours to measure productivity and rates to commoditize your work. Presumption: For an Access developer (in general) they should get an average hourly rate of $X. If that Access developer wants to make more money he or she must either work more...
A day in the life
I worked on copying some class objects and modifying behavior for them to allow the system to process different customers with different information. I am building the system based on exports from a database into a folder of CSV files. The user decides which files to...
Working in small chunks – deliver faster
This is a tip from experience. It is always better to work in smaller chunks and deliver them as quickly as possible than it is to take weeks, months, or gulp... years to deliver the product. The longer it takes to deliver, the less the customer will remember what...
Checking open forms and shutting down Access from code
Today I had fun with Access events and closing the database with unfinished changes to a form that needed to stay open and prevent Access from closing. The problem was that records were able to get to an invalid state by: Users re-opening a form to edit a new record....
Daily writing ideas
Most of the time I come up with new ideas to write about based on what Access work I have done that day. Other sources have been things I've been interested in like Test Driven Development, Code Katas, and using AI as some examples. Basically, now can you utilize...
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