Hello everyone,

Over the past two weeks, the site calendar shows very little, however there has been a significant amount going on behind the scenes.

For starters, I've added two downloads to the site:

1. The UseTemplate add-in is a utility that I developed to make it easier to group and manage templates in an Excel menu. Born out of frustration of extended clicking to get to my templates, and constant wracking of my brain to remember if the template was created in Excel or Word, this add-in was developed to deal with both issues. It adds a menu that collects all local and network templates and sorts them into submenus. I now have a very quick way to access and launch any Word, Excel or Powerpoint template right from Excel. It can be downloaded, free of charge, here.
2. The XLG Favourites add-in is a reinvention of one of my favourite tools. It allows you to add files (both Excel and non-Excel) to the menu. In addition, it allows you to add folders to launch, allowing you to shortcut your browsing when looking for a certain file. A management form also allows you to sort, rename and group your favourites, which are all stored in a database on your hard drive. This add-in can also be downloaded, free of charge, here.

In addition, I have done some work on the popular Export A Range Of Excel Data To A Database article. In a recent project, I discovered that ADO can make use of transaction processing; something that I was under the impression that Access just could not do. This deals with a major issue in the article, since it would previously be possible to update, say 3 of 5 entries, and have the rest fail. For anyone in accounting, you can imagine the issue of finding a journal entry that is only half posted. By making use of transaction processing, you can check for errors, and roll back the entire update if an error is encountered. That entry has been updated, and I have also attached a zip file containing both the Excel and Access files that I used to build the examples.

Over the past month, I've noticed some code fragments posted on this site in help forums as well. While I'm glad that they are out there helping people, I was a little disappointed to find no reference back to the site. This is not because I want to stroke my own ego, but rather because I think it's important that people be made aware of the existence of other articles that may help them. Because of this, I've gone through every article in the site and inserted an "Author" link in the code comments. I'm hoping that code snippets posted to help others will lead them back to other examples here.

Finally, the links page has a few new links on it as well.

My future plans involve developing another add-in, and finishing off a few more articles that I've been working on over the past few weeks. Hopefully the site calendar will look a little more active over the next few weeks.