A few years ago, Joel Spolsky wrote a wonderful article for his site called The Law of Leaky Abstractions, the general idea of which was that while new design technologies such as programming tools that let you build data interfaces by clicking and dragging controls might make things easier for the average professional, they will never replace a solid understanding of the technologies they are built on top of. This is because the tools that do so much work behind the scenes never offer the fine control that the lower level tools will. They also provide an illusion of power that makes it easy to avoid learning the real substance. The article provided some good examples and now I have one of my own to share.
Switching between Access 2010 windows
A visitor to the site asked about using ALT-TAB to switch between open Access windows. This refers to the “Windows in Taskbar” feature which was available in Access prior to Access 2007. You could set Access to display a button for every open Access window on the Windows Task Bar and use the standard ALT-TAB…