Well, I’m back from Dallas. I spent a couple of days on my golf game (and napping game) and a couple of days presenting at the Excel and Access Integration Workshop. The workshop went well. On Monday morning, Mike Alexander talked about integrating Access and Excel from the Access point of view. That afternoon, I took over and presented from the Excel point of view. Since Microsoft Query is a one-way pipe, we didn’t have to discuss putting Excel data into Access, just pulling it out. But it was more than enough for an afternoon.

We started by creating Query Tables. Then we spent the rest of the time encountering every Microsoft Query bug there is – and there’s a lot. I was happy to learn that almost everyone else was encountering the same “Can’t edit query in wizard” and “Can’t represent query graphically” crap that I was encountering. At least it’s not just me. One person never got these errors. We couldn’t figure out why she was so special, but we all agreed that she should sacrifice a goat on every full moon to ensure that her configuration doesn’t go south like ours has.

On Tuesday morning, we started with basic SQL syntax. We hit the high notes, then I told them to go to w3schools.com to get the syntax like I do. Then we moved into VBA. I asked how many people had ever written a macro before and I think three hands went up. I knew we would be taking it slow, but I was surprised at how sophisticated their questions were. When I’m learning something, I tend to gloss over some of the details, just taking them on faith, until I can get bearings. These folks were diving right in with good, hard questions. They asked why they had to use Set for object variables and nothing for non-object variables. That’s a good question. See Roy’s blog for the answer. My answer was “You just do, so stop asking questions.” I didn’t get to the ADO portion of my talk because we went long on the QueryTable stuff. I’d rather have too much information than too much time, so you won’t hear me complaining.

Tuesday night, Jon Peltier came into town and he, Mike, my friend Andrew, and I went to some Australian pub for dinner and drinks. We met at the hotel and Mike said “It’s just around the corner, let’s walk.” Uh, not quite. A mile and a half later we were there. I’m pretty sure it was authentic Australian. The hamburgers were called ‘Australian Hamburgers’. The fries were called ‘Australian Fries’. You can’t argue with that.

At dinner, we discussed our next Excel event. It started off with a couple of presenters in a hotel ballroom, but it seemed to grow to ludicrous proportions. By the time I finished my third Fosters, I think we had settled on Mr. Excel and Mr. Spreadsheet in a steel cage match on the Moon. Stay tuned for details on that one.