Manage Live SharePoint Data In Microsoft Access

A SharePoint site is a very useful platform, but SharePoint cannot handle everything we might want to do with our data. The Microsoft developers have realized that and made it possible to use the SharePoint data with some of their other programs. When you utilize these possibilities you get nearly endless opportunities to work with your SharePoint list items. Here you can learn how to use live SharePoint data in Access.

Access gives extra functionality
When you link data from a SharePoint list to a table in Microsoft Access, you can do much more with your data than you can if you only use SharePoint. This is what Peter shows in the demo:

• How to Search and Replace
• How to make Queries  
• How to show the list data in Forms  
• How to make printable Reports from the list data  
• How to use Visual Basic with data from a SharePoint list

Power use of SharePoint and Access
In the demo below you will meet Peter Kalmstrom, CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions and creator of our Office applications. He says that having Access in the toolbox is nearly a must for power users of SharePoint, and he should know that. Peter is himself a power user of both Microsoft products.

Since more than ten years Access has been one of the database alternatives for sharing and storage of  data in the kalmstrom.com applications, besides SQL Server, and in recent years we have added SharePoint to the options. We also have a product that converts incoming Outlook e-mails into SharePoint list items, HelpDesk OSP.

Microsoft certified SharePoint specialist
Peter has earned all the available Microsoft certifications for SharePoint 2010, and he is also a certified Trainer on SharePoint 2010. He has shared his deep knowledge in several earlier kalmstrom.com Tips, and now he offers you one more tutorial video demonstration.  


Link SharePoint list items to Access The actual linking of the SharePoint data to the Access table is handled elegantly by the two products - you don't have to do anything more than pressing the right button.

Peter shows how to link from the SharePoint list datasheet view to Access. Another possibility is to link from an Access table to SharePoint, which is shown in the kalmstrom.com Tips page about linking live SharePoint list items to Access

Welcome to have a look! I hope you will find the demo useful.

Internet Freedom, SharePoint Tips And People - Popular Blog Posts In March

March gave me many different kinds of blog ideas. Some were read by many, while a few seem to have gone by fairly un-noticed. Let’s concentrate on the positive and have a look at what has been popular!

kalmstrom.com Tips
Peter Kalmstrom, our CEO and creator of the kalmstrom.com products, has made a number of video demonstrations on various topics, and month after month the blog articles about them are among the most visited.

Peter is a Microsoft certified SharePoint Specialist and Trainer, and in March two of his SharePoint tips were the most popular: How to add Javascript to SharePoint and How to Archive SharePoint list items. Many more find their way to the Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website, and we are glad our tips are found useful!
  
Kanban Task Manager
The interest for our new Outlook application for Tasks is still high, and January post about the Kanban board for Outlook is still read by many. This is a good omen for the reception of Kanban Task Manager, when it is released in May.   


Important women and men
Articles about people always get many visits, and in March we had Peter’s post on the International Women’s Day on women who had meant much to him. I wrote about our new Developer Anshul Takalkar and of baby Rimza – son of the kalmstrom.com Lead Developer. And the February story about the engagement of kalmstrom.com Developer Kanak Joshi was much read also in March.


Skype and Internet freedom
I try to cover general subjects within the kalmstrom business area, and in March the post about the incredible growth of Skype after the Microsoft requisition arouse interest.

I also wrote two articles about the UNHRC panel discussion on internet freedom on the last day of February. It was so popular that I wrote a follow up where I reported about the results of the meeting. This article was not as much read as the first one, maybe because I was early with the news the day the discussion was held. Probably people read about the discussion more in detail in news media after seeing my article and were not as interested the second time.

  
German and Swedish growth
In February I told you that the kalmstrom.com Blog was most read in the US and UK, and it was the same in March. But then there is a change: where we earlier had India and China on the second position we now have those two plus Germany and my home country Sweden.

In February the third group of countries with many blog readers were mostly European, but in March we find Brazil and Canada here also. I am not surprised at Canada, because we have several Members of kalmstrom.com Community there, but Brazil is a happy surprise. Maybe we soon may welcome our first Brazilian Community Member?

kalmstrom.com Tip: Use CSS in SharePoint 2010

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a time saving invention when you work with websites. Most web designers want to use a limited number of fonts and colors on a site, and they also want all lists, heading types etc. to have the same look. Instead of adding the code for this on each page the info can be gathered in a CSS file. When a page has a link to that file, all formatting info in the CSS file will be applied to the page. Changes in the CSS file will apply to all pages that have the link, so with CSS it is easy to try out and change the formatting of a website.


Microsoft Certified SharePoint expert
CSS may also be used with SharePoint, but working with SharePoint is not exactly the same as working with web pages. Our kalmstrom.com CEO has earned all the available Microsoft Certifications for SharePoint 2010, so he knows how to do it. In the demo above he shows how to get started with CSS in SharePoint. This demo is also included in the Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website.

Create the CSS file in SharePoint Designer
First Peter creates a CSS file in SharePoint Designer 2010, and since he wants to keep it very simple he just makes a change of the text color. When a link to that CSS file is added to the SharePoint homepage in addition to all the CSS files already uses by default, the custom styles is layered on top of what comes out of the box, and the text color is changed.

Add the CSS link in the browser
However, it is not possible to just add a link to the new CSS file in an ASPX page because SharePoint will not save it. Instead Peter explains how to edit a SharePoint web part in a web browser and add the link to the CSS file that way.

Expansion of SharePoint usage
Peter is fascinated by the endless possibilities of SharePoint 2010. For several years HelpDesk OSP has been one of the most popular kalmstrom.com products, and we also plan to add SharePoint as an alternative for sharing and storage in more applications. In the future kalmstrom.com will make a much stronger use of SharePoint than today, but I will come back to that in later articles.