Using the Outlook View Control on an Access Form, Part 1

How to use the Outlook View Control on an Access form

When Office 2000 was introduced, and the Outlook View Control first became available, I tried it out, but found it so buggy and difficult to work with that I set it aside as unusable.  Recently, I decided to try it again, and found that it had been much improved, with an upgrade in Office XP that addresses some security issues, as well as making the control more stable.  This article shows how to use the Outlook View Control on an Access form.

The Outlook View Control is useful for reviewing Outlook appointments right on an Access form, and you can also create, delete and edit appointments directly in the control, with the changes being saved to Outlook.

To insert an Outlook View Control on an Access form, click the More Controls tool on the Toolbar, and select Microsoft Office Outlook View Control from the very long list of ActiveX controls:

Figure A.  Placing an Outlook View Control on a form

The control’s initial Folder and View properties can’t be set directly in the control’s properties sheet; if you attempt to select a folder or view from the corresponding properties, you will just get this error:  “The operation on the Microsoft Office Outlook View Control object failed”.  However, you can set these properties with a few lines of code in the form’s Load event:

   Me![ocxOutlookView].Folder = “Calendar”

   Me![ocxOutlookView].View = “Day/Week/Month”

A Form with a Single Outlook Calendar

frmSingleOutlookCalendar initially opens displaying the default local Outlook Calendar folder, for today’s date, as shown in Figure B.

Figure B.  The default Outlook calendar displayed in the Outlook View Control on an Access form

To select a different date, right-click the orange header bar with the date, and select Go to Date from the context menu.  In the Go to Date dialog, you can also select a different view; Figure C shows the Week view being selected for a date in the future, and Figure D shows this view in the Outlook View Control:

Figure C.  Selecting a different date and view for the Outlook View Control

Figure D.  A week’s worth of future appointments in the Outlook View Control

Supporting Files

The zip file containing this article, in Word 97-2003 format, plus the supporting file(s), may be downloaded from the Access Archon page of my Web site, as accarch176.zip, which is the last entry in the table of Access Archon columns for Access Watch.