I REALLY appreciate their effort and the quality of their hosting offering.  Thank you WordPress…  Below is their cool little summary of my site activity in 2011.  Interesting stuff.

And thank all of YOU for visiting my site.  You have no idea how good it feels to have so many of you see the value of what I have to say and especially you guys who posted so many times.  Please don’t be shy.  I can see how many came, and that’s great, but your thoughts are interesting to me.

2012 is going to be an interesting year for us all.  Office 15 (2013?) hitting the market in the Fall would be my guess and it’ll be interesting mostly to see how Microsoft positions it.  I believe it is time for Microsoft to get out and show people how to use this stuff rather than just hoping they figure it out on their own.  I don’t expect them to do anything though and if so I think we will continue to see Excel and Access lose altitude.  I don’t think it’s enough to just hope that people “get it”.

So despite a lot of cool new features and some BIG surprises, that I can’t talk about, I predict more of the same as we “believers” fight the fight for Excel and Access on our own with little or no help from above.  We all have to ask ourselves whether it’s worth it and each will have to draw their own conclusions.

It’ll be interesting, but let’s keep in touch as it all happens.

Dick

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 29,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

I know this is slight OT but maybe not totally.

A lot of us work at home right?  Also many of us have dogs (like you Mark in SevenOaks) and because we work at home our dogs are with us all day.  I have definitively proven that my Labrador Bella has learned not only to come to me and ask to be let out or walked AFTER I finish a phone call (every time) BUT she actually comes to me as I’m wrapping up the call (??).

In other words, something in how I close out conversations (tone or certain words or phrases) makes her realize that I am ALMOST  done talking and she should come to me and ask for my attention at that point.  That’s amazing to me !

This is only 1 of my 2 dogs BTW ..  her sister Mae, (also a Lab), is oblivious ).

There’s no question that our dogs (well the smarter ones) are really in tune with us and that is cool to me…

Dick

p.s. Can you guess which one’s the one I’m talking about?  Pretty easy isn’t it

But one thing that’s making all the work a lot harder is all the f***ing PASSWORDS I have to remember over and over !!

Every system or network I log into has different rules for passwords and different expiry dates and I am getting stumped regularly trying to keep all of them organized.  I am as I write this on hold with a guy in India trying to get my password for the internal MS Time Management system.  I have to log in twice with 2 different logins to get stumped on yet another dialog !!  The guy has now put me on hold…

Here is my favourite Dilbert on this topic:

http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Squirrel%20Noises

Why is Scott Adams the only person who speaks up on these annoying tech issues?  It reminds me of how Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert seem to be the only people who clearly see the absurdity of American politics. Where would we be without the Court Jesters?  Where are we going when the only ones who see the truth and speak up ARE the Court Jesters?

Dick

http://www.powerpivotpro.com/2011/12/friday-bonus-excel-goes-gangsta/

The reference to Wilford Brimley is a bit sobering but tragically accurate …

Thanx Rob and Jocelyn for you great hospitality and your sweet dawgs.

Dick

Here is a link to info on this session.  I think if you’re in the London area and you care about Excel you will  not be disappointed with the kind of stuff Simon and his presenters will show you.  I hope to be able to be there myself if things work out.

http://xlconf.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/uk-excel-developer-conference-date-and-location

Dick

The Gate-Keepers are often corporate DBA’s who are deathly afraid that users might hurt themselves if they actually get the data they need to help them analyze performance and plan their business futures (even though they are already doing it mostly in “crappy”, dangerous, silos of user-designed and maintained spreadsheets already anyway).  The rest are the makers of third-party accounting or BI software who’s sole motivation is simply to get total control of the data and the process so the business is forced to keep paying them forever and ever …

By forcing BDMs to flail along with stand-alone spreadsheets without direct or reliable integration with REAL corporate FACTS they are exposing the business to risks that may or may not be large.  Regardless, these processes are inefficient at best and frustrating to users and their bosses no end.  The efforts to eliminate spreadsheets altogether (which is the unspoken goal of most IT “Professionals” anyway)  simply has not and will not work.  That is unless they can succeed in moving everyone to the browser-based “calculators” being offered as Excel alternatives by Google and even Microsoft and eliminate the powerful Office Client Excel that has so much power and capability.  That would be unconscionably stupid.

In the case that has me worked up today it is data being collected by a 3rd party software provider who takes simple, straightforward collected data and presents it to the user in an awkward, complex and generally useless GUI in a browser that takes otherwise logical and straight-forward data and makes the export of the data to Excel a painful, inefficient, and in the end unusable, process – thus making use of their data outside of their interface (which they will sell the client and reporting module BTW ) impossible.

I have run into this in the BI “Universe” as well where at one client we have been trying to get the data we need for a critical business analysis tool in Excel for TWO YEARS to no avail.  I have found more and more cases where DBA’s will simply not allow departmental users or developers access to the very data they need to run their businesses while it’s being collected and collected but is being used for absolutely nothing.

To me the efforts made by DBA’s and 3rd Party software developers to prevent the effective import of corporate data into Excel is a major impediment to Corporations.  Tragically these Corporations don’t even realize it’s true or how much inefficiency and extra cost they are accepting as normal.  BDM’s as a rule defer to the “Professionals” in their IT brain’s trust or worse they are afraid to cross IT (like you might not to complain to the Police for fear of repercusiions).   It is truly a tragedy.

We should all remember that it is THE BUSINESS that matters, not the careers of the IT “professionals”.  And we are supposed to be working at using technology to make business processes better and more flexible not less.  We are servants to the Business not the other way around and whenever that gets forgotten we all lose.

Dick

I have spent far too much time in the last few weeks trying to build what is actually a fairly straight-forward Access 2010 Browser-Only form for a client, and I seem to have finally come up with the magic trick to make things work – but it has been unnecessarily difficult IMHO.

I would create a nice-looking Web Project form that would run perfectly on the client that would then fail when published to the Web … in other words simply making a form work on the client does NOT mean it will run in your Browser – in fact more often than not it won’t – and the reason is never explained and always looks like your fault until you exhaust all possible combination of Master/Child relationships, parameterized rowsources, or the incredibly powerful but cryptic BrowseTo function in your Macro code.  It all ended up failing for me over and over to the point I was thinking for the first time in years, that this simply wasn’t going to work.

Then I tried the TEMPVARS method which I knew was one that I would try eventually but only after I exhausted all the usual techniques that I as an Access Developer would think might work.  And it solved everything !!

Simple fact:

You can create a TEMP variable in code (say on the AfterUpdate or OnCurrent of a form or subform)  and then refer to that as a variable in any code or open form on display in a formula like this =[Tempvars]![varName]

Here are 3 places I used the TEMPVARS in my app:

1. Redefined the variable in Code for the AfterUpdate of a Text Box:

2.  Referenced in as the Source of a TextBox Control:

What’s interesting is that this TEMPVAR is referring to a field on a subform that is calcing the total for a field (“[CAD]“) in that subform like this:

This Control is on the subform and is a hidden field.  Then that form has an OnCurrent Event like this that resets the TEMPVAR being used by the Control in the Parent which immediately picks up that value for display:

I’m sure that this could probably be done with another event on the subform but I KNOW that it will work in the OnCurrent so I am happy with that .. (“Get ‘er Done !!!”)

3. In the Query driving the Rowsource of a Listbox:

Every one of these usages ofTEMPVARS solved ALL my problems.  It simply means that by redefining TEMPVARS as events fire in my various Forms, Subforms and Controls and with a few well timed requeries in code, I can effectively do all the same things I am used to doing with Master/Child relationships, with Query parameters or as Formulae in informational Contols such as aggregations.  And BTW the table source for this Form and Subform has 60,000+ records and it is REALLY fast at refreshing … faster than when run on the client actually.

Maybe this technique is posted somewhere else on the “Internets” or it’s in somebody’s book (which you should then go out and buy immediately) but I had to figure this out the hard way.  What this does is open me up to do many, many more things in Access Services Web Forms.  Too bad I had to learn it the hard way (like I used to all the time )..

Dick

This is because I have focused on Excel and Access and SQL Server (and lately SharePoint), developing transactional databases and budgeting and reporting documents using standard aggregations of business data.  Having the data ensconced in a Data Warehouse with OLAP dimensions and Fact tables occasionally has been a big asset for me and frankly I’ve never understood why BI isn’t more broadly used.

Of course the answer has been that BI has been the realm of the BI gate-keepers in every organization I have known and the last things they seem to want is for anyone to actually get any value out of their precious snowflake designs  without their help .

Also it seems that to be a BI dev you have to be an MDX guru and frankly it is your job to make the whole thing so complex and inpenetrable that the clients or their company needs them to use the technology – job security anyone?

Now with the release of PowerPivot Microsoft is trying to make BI available to the general IW marketplace but to date it seems to me to have been designed primarily for those same BI gurus with the introduction of the DAX “language” (or whatever you call it) into the PowerPivot environment.

As I have mentioned before, I have found DAX an almost impossible hill to climb.  I always thought and now I am convinced that this is because I am fundamentally a relational database guy and I believe that nearly everything I need to do in BI can be accommodated in the data sources themselves (either in SQL Views or Functions or in Access queries), but that you needed complex, convoluted DAX expressions if you wanted to do the one thing that I believe is the core of BI – Hierarchies.  Without intrinsic hierarchies I see very little value to a product like PowerPivot (other than its amazing capacity) as anything but just another way to do aggregations and to source Pivot Tables.

But Hierarchies in PowerPivot CTP3 change everything for me.  You see, I have used and plan to use BI hierarchies as the secret to a reliable, flexible accurate reporting capability.  With Hierarchies I only have to define the hierarchical order of the Dimensions of my database and I can then roll up my data at any level up and down and across my financial, sales, production or budgeting data in a flash, and as new values show up or disappears in the data it gets automatically assigned to the correct level in the hierarchy and reflects immediately in all levels of roll-ups.  This means a reporting capability that does not require the client to call me every time they add a new office or SKU or reorganize their regions and restructure their management team responsibilities.  Everything is managed from tables through the established hierarchies of the “Cube”.

A properly designed OLAP data store should be able to handle all these changes easily and consistently while maintaining the value of historical data and be automatically able to accommodate the future.  And it is Hierarchical Dimensions related to Fact tables of core data that are how most of us can get value out of BI that we can’t get any other way.  Of course there are other more complex uses of OLAP design, but for the vast majority of business users THIS is the core use of BI … to do aggregations up and down and across their business data, across time in various increments, looking for jewels of revelation, for planning and budgeting help, for tracking KPIs and for standard period-end management reporting.

Lets explain …  By assigning your corporate structure to a Hierarchy such as World, Region,Country,State or Province, County, City you can expand a level in a pivot table and it will KNOW what the CHILD level should be shown automatically by design.  Without Hierarchies those relationships will have to be defined in every Pivot Table of CUBE Formulas usage you make from the data.  This way the levels of the hierarchy can now be defined in PowerPivot  at the table level and are inherited every time you create a report.  The key is that the user does not need to know that hierarchy and they can’t screw it up as easily on a report – it is “baked in” the data source.

So now that PowerPivot will have Hierarchies I believe that I will be able to do the vast majority of the things I used to have to do using DAX functions by using Hierarchies instead.  I also believe that if I am a SQL Server or Microsoft Access Developer I can do most if not all of my convolutions (transformations?) of data there rather than by using DAX, thereby being able to apply my existing knowledge to this new capability and also it will allow me to manage my data at the source rather than in some abstract middle-ware.  I will use PowerPivot simply to manage my Hierarchies in my dimension tables to allow me to create cool new reports in Excel and/or SharePoint while managing the data at source as much as possible.  Use the right tool for the right job.

This is NOT a criticism at all of DAX or PowerPivot, this is just an alternative way to approach using this product.  Frankly it looks to me like DAX is a product for use by BI people who aren’t necessarily strong in Relational databases (which seems odd to me) and who definitely are not Excel gurus.  If you are going to use ALL these tools together (data sources in SQL or Access, etc,  Hierarchies in your Snowflake OLAP design in PowerPivot and your newly powerful and capable Excel Pivot Tables and CUBE formula-driven spreadsheets in either SharePoint or on the client) then the addition of Hierarchies in PowerPivot is the final shoe to drop.

Now we can get to work.

Dick

I have outlined ad nauseum here the advantages of this technology with regards to deployment, performance distribution, even the fact that most Hybrid applications in Access 2010 have limited impact on SharePoint Server operations.  And yet nothing (or next to nothing).

I was stunned when MS decided to include Access Services in Office 365 but the absence of Reporting Services capability pretty much completely destroys that idea.  I have touted AccessHosting.com (owned by Larry Strange who I like very much) and there have been some people heading to him thanx to this Blog.  Please keep in mind that Access Hosting has made a BG commitment to this technology, YOUR technology, and is willing to work wth you on making your experience the best it can be (including Reporting ).

In the interest of fairness I would be glad to review any other offering in this vein of course.

But regardless who you use as your Access Server supplier, I believe that there should be pressure to get more info out there about this technology and perhaps even a little hint of future plans for Access Services so we can go to our clients and make a better case for using Access with SharePoint.

Thoughts?

Dick

About myself I learned that I was capable of discipline .  I could get up at 6:30 and get to the office by 7:30 or 8 and work steadily on one thing until 5 or 6 pm.  First I was amazed that I had no problem with energy or attention.  As a work-at-home developer for 25+ years the draw of the bed for a nap or the dog-walk or the break watching tv is strong and sucks productivity out of me.  I can feel it happening already in the 2 days I’ve been back.  As much as the idea of going to an office every day has always looked to me like going to jail for 8 to 10 hour a day I can now see some value from it.  It also helps that I worked with a great bunch of characters inside a cool business for that time, so maybe I was just lucky.

So my big challenge now is to try to apply this new-found discipline in my regular environment of flitting from project to project within a day.  It’s going to be a challenge but it’s gotta be done (if nothing it will mean making more money actually – what a concept ??).  But it will be hard to do with Grandkids, dogs, wife, friends and generally with the interference of a life.  Frankly I don’t know how people can have a life and work in an office every day.  I have just spent 2 1/2 months doing nothing but work, eat and sleep (no tourism either) and I found I was finally getting enough done in a day … but how do you lay that over your life and not lose out on both the work and the life?  It’s got me thinking to be sure.

Secondly I discovered that Access Services is the real thing.  3 years ago I bet on Access Services and I have had some real successes (and no failures) with the Hybrid version of Access 2010 and Access Services.  Once again the Hybrid has come through strongly in this latest project but I also was forced (against my will frankly ) to include a lot of Browser-only content and I found it didn’t take me long to get the hang of pumping out some compelling and functional Browser-only Access 2010 Forms and Reports.  I have reached the point where I can manipulate the Web Form design almost as quickly and easily as as a client form (but with a lot less functionality of course).

Sure the Macros in WebForms are a little bizarre … and I’m not willing to say it’s just because they’re different, but I have found a set of techniques that seem to get the job done (BrowseTo anyone?) and I have to always keep in mind the limitations of this 1.0 technology.

Thirdly, having been allowed to work on one project 40+ hours a week for 9ish weeks I have once again been overwhelmed by howpowerful Microsoft Access really is as a rapid development tool.  Frankly what we accomplished in that time cost a fraction of alternative solutions and provides a great user-environment for a serious production application ina  real serious business.

I just hope that Microsoft doesn’t drop the ball on Excel and especially Access with their drive to convert Office 15 to a “Google-Killer” while reducing their internal resources and costs.  In the end something will probably have to give and it just might be the Access that we know and love.

The jury’s out on that for me and I will be keeping a close eye on the progress in Office 15 while arguing for Excel and Access as loudly as I can without getting myself turfed out of the “club” …

In the end it’s good to be home and I promise to Blog more … thanx for sticking with me.

Dick

p.s. I can’t possibly thank Mark White enough for the “lead” on this Holland project.  Thank you my friend and I will do whatever I can to return the favour somehow.

p.p.s  I am having serious probems with Access after installing Office 2010 SP1.  It keeps corrupting my VBA code and forcing me to run Access with the DECOMPILE switch to get it back.  I am not sure whether this will be an issue for users who are not editing the code but it is enough for me to be rolling back my SP1 install and suggesting my clients not to upgrade either until MS comes up with a fix.

To run Access in DECOMPILE mode until I get the SP rolled back (which hopefully works) I created a Desktop shortcut for it with the following command-line:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\MSACCESS.EXE” /decompile

Be warned !!