BlogOffice

Contact List Management

There are several hundred of us now on this blog (woo hoo!), which brought me face to face with a new challenge in email management: the number of recipients on the BlogofficeXP list exceeds my ISP's capacity to send bulk email. That’s a great problem to have! But day before yesterday, after sending the most recent post, I needed to find a way to cleanly divide the distribution list so that my service provider wouldn’t balk. Once I figured it out, it was a snap. Here’s the process:

• Contacts view, double-click your distribution list to open it.
  
  
• Open the File menu and choose Copy to Folder. The list is copied to an email message (if you scroll down you’ll see the distribution list icon at the bottom of the address list).
  
  
• Drag the icon to your Contacts window. (You may want to email it to yourself so that you have a complete list tucked away somewhere in addition to your Address Book.)
  
• Double-click the list to open it; change the title, delete or add names; then save. Voila—the new list.

Btw, last night I bought a new USB Flash drive to test out...it looks very cool. Rumor has it that people walk up and down the hallways at Microsoft wearing these things on cords around their necks. The USB drive has now officially replaced pocket protectors for those of us interested in geek fashions. I'll let you know how it looks...er, I mean works. :) k

Catching Up

My older brother rarely sends email to family because he says, "There's too much to say." I know the feeling. :) I've been buried in work (which is a good thing) and haven't been updating here as regularly as I'd like. Several of you have written to me with questions and I've tried to respond to most personally, but I thought I'd pass along one issue that many of us seem to struggle with. If you work with Access regularly, trying to make time-related functions do what you want them to do, I have a little help for you. Thanks very much to Rita, Microsoft Access MVP Lead, for putting together these resources for Access challenges:

Check out these Microsoft Knowledge Base articles:

325238: HOW TO: Create a Stopwatch Form in Access 2002 [http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;325238]

233275: ACC2000: How to Create a Stopwatch Form [http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;233275]

210604: ACC2000: Functions for Calculating and Displaying Date/Time Values [http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;210604]

88657: ACC: Functions for Calculating and Displaying Date/Time Values [http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;88657]

210276: ACC2000: Storing, Calculating, and Comparing Date/Time Data [http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;210276]

130514: ACC: Storing, Calculating, and Comparing Date/Time Data [http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;130514]

142871: ACC: How to Create a Stopwatch Form (95/97) [http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;142871]

Two other good sources: The Access MVP web site (http://www.mvps.org/access/) and the Access Developer's Handbook (authors are Litwin/Getz/Gunderloy).

If you've written to me personally with a question, suggestion, or comment, thanks for your patience and keep the faith! I'm digging out this week and will try to catch up on all my flagged email (the flagging feature is really great in Outlook 2003, btw). More soon! :) k