Access Archon #162
Getting around Vista Security
We have all seen those ads where the Mac guy acts superior to the PC guy who is constantly bothered by the Vista Secret Service agent asking if he wants to cancel or continue every time he tries to do something on his computer. Unfortunately, that ad is no exaggeration – this is exactly the situation when you are working in Vista. And, worse than that, sometimes Vista prevents you from doing what you want to do without even putting up a dialog that lets you click Continue to proceed.
Access add-ins that worked in previous versions of Access won’t run on Vista – you can’t even install them – because of Vista security. To install an Access add-in so that it will run in Vista, you need to run Access as an administrator. For some reason, you can’t just right-click the Access item in the Start menu and select “Run as administrator,” as you can do with some programs; you have to open the Explorer folder where the Access executable is stored, which is the Office12 folder under the main Office folder. On my computer, Office 2007 is installed to a custom folder, but if you install it to the default folder, it will probably be in C:Program FilesMicrosoft Office. In the Office12 subfolder, right-click the MSACCESS.EXE file and select “Run as administrator” from the context menu, as shown in Figure C.
Figure C. Running Access as an administrator
Click the Continue button on the User Account Control dialog to open Access in Administrator mode. To install the add-in, just click the Access Options button on the Office menu (you don’t need to open a database), and select Add-ins in the left pane to open the Add-ins page. Select Access Add-ins from the Manage list at the bottom of the page and click Go (as shown in Figure D) to open the Add-in Manager, and select the add-in and click the Install button to install it, as shown in Figure E. After this, the add-in should work (providing any other required changes have been made), even in regular Access mode.
Figure D.
Figure E.
Figure F shows the LNC Rename menu add-ins on the Add-ins menu; Figure G shows the LNC Rename Builder being selected from the Name property of a control on a newly created form, whose bound controls have the same names as their fields (yes, this is still the case in Access 2007!). The LNC Builder’s default action is to rename the control with the appropriate prefix (in this case, txtContactID), though you can edit the proposed.
Figure F. LNC Rename menu add-ins
Figure G. Using the LNC Property Builder to rename a control
For more detailed information on how to use the LNC Rename add-in, see Access Archon #75. The functionality of this add-in is the same for all Office versions.
Note
The special techniques covered in this article apply only to Access add-ins. VB 6 add-ins will work fine in Vista, if they are installed in Administrator mode. Visual Studio 2005 add-ins work in Vista with no special actions at all – you don’t even need to install them. For some purposes, it is easier to create a VB 6 or Visual Studio add-in instead of an Access add-in, if you just need the functionality of menu add-ins, or want to place buttons on the Ribbon (see my new book for examples of this) – but you can only create Wizards and Builders in an Access add-in.
Supporting Files
The zip file containing this article, in Word format, plus the supporting file(s), may be downloaded from the Access Archon page of my Web site. It is accarch162.zip, which is the last entry in the table of Access Archon columns for Access Watch.
|
Document Name |
Document Type |
Place in |
|
LNC Rename.accda |
Access 2007 library database |
Addins folder, for Vista usually C:UsersUser NameAppDataRoamingMicrosoftAddIns |
