Office Suites

by John Heenan , NOCCC , jc_heenan@a-wares.com - July 08, 2002 at 16:54:31:

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In a prior session of the SIG, we used the Wizard to create the skeleton of an Order Entry application. The application is to be customized to our own needs. Part of that customization is to use the Contacts in MS Outlook as a replacement for the Customer table. The impact of this is that references to the Customer table will have to be changed throughout the application. For example, the original Customers table uses a label "Company Name", where as the Contacts from Outlook uses "Company". All forms, queries and reports that use the Customer-Contacts table would require changes to references to the company name. This can be a tedious task. We will see the impact as we reconstruct Our Order Entry application.

To use the Contacts in Outlook, we have a choice of either an importing or a linking method to create the table. The first difference we see in the two methods is that the lists of field names are not the same. An exported MDB (Access) file from Outlook contains the Home address of the individual as well as his business address. So, each of the two lists need to be reviewed to see which of the two methods of input will provide the data necessary for our application.

The Link Method has an advantage over the import method by allowing one to update the Outlook Contacts in real-time. That is, any changes made to a Contact record as an item in a table are also made in Outlook at the same time, and vice-versa. The disadvantage to this method is the time for Access to open the table. It must go through a conversion from Outlook to Access file formats.

With either method of input, i.e. Import or Link, the data base has no primary key, requirement for major tables in Access. We might try using the Phone field, because most likely it will be unique to each record in the Contacts Table. On the other hand, if the Link method is used, we discover that one of the data fields is named "Account". This field can be used to assign each Customer-Contact a unique identification. The problem, we discover while returning to Outlook, is that the contact form shows no field named Account. However, if we open a contact and select the "All Fields’ tab, and select from Miscellaneous Fields, there at the top of the list is "Account".

It would be more convenient to have this field under the General tab, so let’s modify the outlook Contacts form. We will continue this task next month.

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Last update: 7/08/2002

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