Product Reviews
Total Access Analyzer 2002
The standard for documenting Access databases
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.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.