Open Other Programs Seminar

Have you ever wanted to build a database to store an unlimited number of documents or other file attachments with each record? Perhaps you'd like to double-click on any of those files and have them automatically open up in the appropriate program? Open a Word document representing the employee's resume, or automatically have an Excel spreadsheet open up for the client's purchase order. Perhaps you'd like to click on a button next to the customer's address and have your web browser open up directly to that address into Google Maps?

This seminar will teach you how to open other programs, documents, and custom web page addresses from inside your Microsoft Access databases. Topics include:

Click here to watch the first lesson of the Seminar in our Online Theater:

Here's What You'll Learn

We'll start out by building the sample database we'll use in class. This will be a simple customer table, with a related (one-to-many) table to store an unlimited number of attachments per customer. We'll create a centralized Attachments folder and we'll copy some sample files there. You'll learn how to display an external image on a form.

Next you will learn how to double-click on those attachment filenames and have them open up in the program you specify using an event with a little bit of VBA code and the SHELL function. You will learn how to determine what program to use to open the file (TXT files in Notepad, DOCX files in Word, etc.)

It's nice to be able to specifically control which program you want to open a specific type of file, but sometimes you want Access to just use the default program that's installed in Windows. This is called the "default handler" for that file type. You may not know if they have Adobe Acrobat installed for PDF files, so in that case Windows might open them in Word. In the next lesson we'll learn about the ShellExecute function which can deal with this scenario.

Next we'll build a button that we can click on to open the customer's address up directly in Google Maps. This will involve creating a custom URL and launching the default browser. You'll also see how you can open Windows Explorer to browse folders, and how to use a mailto link to send email.

Finally we'll learn some advanced features about the ShellExec subroutine we build in class. We'll see how to set up error handling for when a file cannot be opened, learn about public and private constants, and learn about different arguments for ShellExec like "OPEN" and "PRINT".

If you want to be able to work with external files and programs with Access, this is the perfect seminar for you. You will learn everything mentioned above. You will have access to the full database that we build in class with all of these features. If you have any question whether this seminar is right for you, please feel free to contact me.

Opening Other Programs Outline