Fremus.co.za

Okay so today I did a few interesting things, the first of which was to setup Vista and XP on the same network, and I must be totally honest, its not as difficult or insane or bad as this one guy at a computer shop told me. The impression he gave me was that Vista and XP were like totally incompatible, and of course I found this to NOT be the case. I was able to share files, and do a few TS sessions. Not sure what the hidden dangers are here. I would love to have Windows Server 2008 actually, with IIS 7.

I also did some more VBA today. Now before you cringe there is one important thing that people need to realise in today’s situations and that is that solutions that work ultimately win over customers, whether you use VBA or C# to achieve it, it doesn’t matter really. I must say that I have to force myself not to type a semicolon after each line of VBA code. The VBA code I looked at again was creating PowerPoint presentations from Access. This is useful when you use a lot of presentations on a regular basis, and the information being used in them can be normalised, and made more reusable.

Why would you want to use Powerpoint and Access together you may ask? I can give you a brief description of a scenario to illustrate the possible use of Access and Powerpoint, and I believe its always a good idea to narratively describe a problem (or solution) before you jump straight into it.

The church I go to every Sunday uses projectors to display hymns and scripture, and of course they use Powerpoint. For each sermon at our church we have a Powerpoint presentation that displays a certain number of hymns and certain parts of scripture. The order in which the scripture and hymns appear on the slides is pre-determined by our pastor’s liturgy. The liturgy determines in which order the hymns are sung and the scriptures are read. The hymns and scriptures might appear before and after each other. The key though is that the hymns and scripture are elements that are re-used the whole time, and are simply arranged within the liturgy, and theoretically you should not be re-creating the content for each sermon. Instead you should have a system in place that allows you to dynamically create the content as you need it. More specifically you should have a database that stores the scripture and hymn elements and have an interface that extracts the data as you need it and generates the content, which would be Powerpoint slides. So here I was thinking that there has to be some interoperability between Powerpoint and Access. On a simple user interface level this interoperability does not exist, but where it does seem to exist is in something called “Automation”. I found this MSDN article which uses VBA to achieve that exact result. It seems pretty simple at face value.