Q: Richard, My boss takes inputs from employees regarding vacation and business trip dates, and updates the office Outlook 07 calendar.  I maintain an Access-based database for my office that tracks, among other things, vacation and business trip dates.  Every month, I update this database with the dates from the calendar, then upchannel a custom report to his superiors. This is creating a redundancy of effort (he puts in the dates, I read the dates from the calendar, then manually input them into my database to generate the report.)  I there a way to tie in my Access report with his Outlook calendar so that the report is automatically populated?


A: You can connect to Outlook from inside of Access by linking to it. Now, I haven't tried this in Access 2007 yet, but I'm sure it's available.

In Access 2003 and earlier, you'd click on File > Get External Data > Link Tables.

Then, under FILES OF TYPE select Outlook. You should then see a listing of all of the objects in Outlook. You can link to contacts, your inbox, calendar, etc. Select the CALENDAR. Access will then link directly to the calendar as a table.

You'll notice there are two fields: Created and Modified. By reading the values in these fields, you should be able to figure out which ones are new/edited and be able to generate your report accordingly.