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Keep your data in sync with Access database replication

By Mary Ann Richardson, Special to ZDNet Asia
Thursday, March 06, 2008 02:45 PM

By keeping your Access database on a local server, you have one centralized home for all your data, while allowing your employees to upload new data at will from their own replicas.

Microsoft Access

Keep your data in sync with Access database replication

For less network congestion, you can have your employees work off of a local server, and then periodically upload any changes to keep all data throughout the organization in sync. For example, if would like your salespeople to work with a local copy of the Access database on their department server, you can use Access' replication feature to create a replica of the database for them to work with and then synchronize that with the master copy on the central file server.

To create the replica, follow these steps:

Open the replica.
Go to Tools | Replication.
Select the Master Design DB from the Directly With Replica drop-down list.
Click OK.
Click Yes and then OK.

The data and design of both the master and replica are now up to date.

Microsoft Word

Set a language to a style in Word

If your work requires typing blocks of non-English text within your English-language Word documents, then you know how annoying it can be when Word continues to proofread the non-English text using its English dictionary.

Word automatically proofreads your document for the language version installed on your system. So, if you purchased your copy of Word in the United States, it will mark all the text as English (U.S.) and will proof the non-English text against the English (U.S.) dictionary.

When you add a block of foreign phrases, Word's spelling and grammar checker will flag them as incorrect rather than proof them against the appropriate foreign language dictionary. You could set up Automatic Language Detection; however, this method is not foolproof for smaller blocks of text.

To let Word know which dictionary to use to proof the text, you should mark it for proofing in its own language by assigning a language style.

Follow these steps:

Type the foreign language text.
Select the text.
Go to Tools | Language | Set Language.
Scroll to and select the language from the Mark Selected Text As list.
Click OK.
Go to View | Task Pane.
Click the Getting Started arrow and select Styles And Formatting from the list.
With the text still selected, click New Style.
Enter a name for the style (such as French) in the Name box.
Click OK.

Now when you want Word to proof your text in French, highlight the text and select French from the drop-down Style box in the Formatting toolbar. This new style will be available to the current document only. If you want it to be available to the template the document is based on, click the Add To Template check box in the New Style dialog box after step 9 and before clicking OK.

Microsoft Excel

Make Excel spreadsheets easier to read with natural language range names

Whether you are using Excel spreadsheets for training or to present an analysis of last year's sales results, it is much easier to show the logic behind the formulas if they are based on named ranges instead of cell references.

For example, if the formula used for Total Cost is =B5*B6, the reader would have to search for those cells to see exactly what they represent. Compare this formula with Total Cost written as =Unit Cost * Number Sold, which uses the heading labels for the Unit Cost and Number Sold spreadsheet columns. Readers would quickly understand where the values for this formula came from.

Using natural language range names doesn't mean you have to define a name for each cell used in a formula; you can simply use the labels that are already in your spreadsheet. However, you cannot do this automatically. You must first set up the spreadsheet so that it will recognize the labels in the formulas.

Follow these steps:

Go to Tools | Options.
On the Calculation tab, click the Accept Labels To Formula check box.
Click OK.

You can use natural language range names just as you would cell names in a formula. You can even copy and paste the formulas based on natural language range names; relative addressing still applies.