Product Reviews

Total Access Analyzer 2002

The standard for documenting Access databases

• By Mike Gunderloy
• 04/03/2002

FMS makes quite a few useful utilities now, but this is the one that started them off in the Microsoft Access world a decade back. TA Analyzer is, quite simply, the standard for documenting Access databases and projects.

To use TA Analyzer, you open it from the Add-Ins menu, select objects (or your entire database) and tell it to get to work. It then goes off and gets as much information as it possibly can from those objects. It combines this with performance and error analysis to make suggestions about improving your database, and builds dependency diagrams to show you which objects are used where.

Particularly notable in this new addition (besides the obvious support for Access 2002 databases) is the extended list of best practices and suggestions. For example, if you've created a listbox control with its LimitToList set to No, but haven't written a NotInList event, Analyzer will flag this as a probable error (you can also decide which things to check for if you don't agree with FMS's best practices). Property listings, lots of reports, cross-references, field dictionaries, searching in the documentation...I could fill the whole review with a simple feature listing. But suffice it to say that this remains one of the most essential add-ins on the market for the serious Access developer.