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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 06/09/2010 Microsoft’s already
introduced Office 2010 and I and many users are still having frustrations
upgrading to Office 2007 – or – you don’t
have to upgrade to every new version. As an
Access programmer, I had to learn after the fact that Access 2007 is the first
major rewrite of Access in 12 years, and that Microsoft has built all kinds
of new security features into it that they don’t tell you about. So this
means that when I copied a folder of an Access program I created in a
previous version to my Windows 7 computer with Office 2007 on it and opened it,
the program opened to the menu I had created, but then when I clicked on the
menu buttons, none of them worked. Of course
no error message box came up helping me through the problem. I had to close
the application and head out to the internet to Access users groups, and find
out that Access 2007 has a new Trust center built into it, so you have
to tell it the folders you are going to put trusted programs in – every
single folder ... . Having
done that I felt confident that I would now be working in Access 2007 with no
further problems. So I
opened one of my programs and clicked on a menu button, and this time the
button worked much to my relief, but then the program immediately crashed
– much to my chagrin, giving me now a very cryptic low level error
message ,
I’ve
never heard of a file named utility.mda, but even worse when I click on the
error message “ok” it dumps me right into an error condition deep
inside the Microsoft visual basic module. Now
there’s a Merle Haggard song “Big City” which has a line
about being turned loose in the middle of Montana, and it would be easier to
find your way out of Montana than to find your way out of this error
condition in the Microsoft visual basic module. I finally
got out of it and went to the Microsoft.com site and typed in utility.mda
and there was no helpful information about this file whatsoever. I had to start searching through
Web-based Access help sites, many of which want to sign you up to buy help
for the problem you’re having.
After
dozens of site searches, I found an email reference to this error message by
another frustrated user, who had
left a subsequent message saying that he had answered his own question, and
it had to do with clicking off this reference in the Microsoft visual basic
module. That
didn’t exactly tell me how to fix the problem, but it gave me enough of
an idea that I was able to open the program I got that cryptic error message
in, then I clicked on Database Tools – Opened the visual basic module
– then clicked
on References – and sure enough a box popped up which
showed a reference to the missing file utility.mda – and when I clicked
it off and closed the module, my program worked fine.
I know
I’ve lost most of you in this explanation, and I almost lost myself,
and this is the type of problem that can cost you megabucks in your own time
spent or expensive customer support fees trying to fix. And
it’s all because I upgraded instead of staying where I was ... |
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For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2009 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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