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10,000 DOWNLOADS--and counting  

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George Hepworth, the man behind Grover Park Consulting, has been designing and building custom MS Access^© database tools for more than 15 years. He specializes in salvaging poorly designed relational databases and "flat table" databases (primarily in MS Access or MS Excel) which cost you time and money you can't afford.

Let him revise an existing database, or design and build a custom database to meet your business needs.

Database Design Solutions Let us help you control your business by designing tools to capture, track and use the critical information it needs.

For more than 22 years, George has also been  creating "best in the industry" training materials. His self-study courses have been used by insurance professionals throughout the United States.

Training Solutions Let us provide you and your employees the training you need to make better use of your time and resources. We'll get you up and running on your MS Office suite of applications in no time. With more than 22 years experience, George Hepworth, owner of GPC can help you analyze your training needs, design materials and classes to address them, and provide either group or one-one-one training on demand.

Technical Communication George is a successful, experienced writer and author with more than a dozen self-study courses on a variety of insurance coverages to his credit.
His newest training book, Grover Park George on Access, is being well received by new Access users. Let him create readable, informative documentation for your organization.

If at first you do succeed, why not try again?

 Seeing 10,000 downloads for the first template I submitted has encouraged me to try again.

"Simple Work Tracking for Project Managers"

Recently, I uploaded a new template to the MS template site. For this upload, I selected "Simple Work Tracking for Project Managers", which was an mdb I had created several years. I recently updated it to an Access 2007 version and added new features in the mdb.  MS usually takes a couple of days to process new submissions, so it might not show up yet. Please keep checking back until it does get published.

UPDATE: Turns out MS doesn't like my newest template. Supposedly, it contains inappropriate language. You can judge for yourself by downloading the full, working version here.

10,000 DOWNLOADS and counting

A little over a year ago I submitted a template for Access 2007 to the Access Templates site. Absolutely simple, it has nothing more than a table schema and a couple of forms with comments on the tables. MS is still trying to figure out how to accept databases with VBA in them, and most of us are still trying to figure out how to create useful databases without VBA (embedded macros are okay, but, well, they are still macros.)

But 10,000 downloads is still amazing to me. It makes me think there is a way to make use of this important tool offered by MS, if I can just figure out a viable way to do it.

Today, June 27th, 2009, I checked the download site. MS reports that my contribution has been downloaded over 10,000 times. Wow, more than 10,000 people have looked at my work. And moreover, it's the number one community-submitted download. Not in the same league as the MS templates, to be sure, but still I'm thrilled to see it.

PAUG Presentation

On Wednesday, June 17th, I had the pleasure of presenting a small demo of my Previous Weekday Code at the monthly meeting of the Portland Access Users Group. It's available as a download here.

New Demo available.

I just uploaded a new demo database, available in both Access 2003 (mdb) and Access 2007 (accdb) formats.  The demo itself is fairly simple; it takes two arguments--a start date and a weekday--and returns the date in the prior 7 days on which that weekday falls. To me, the larger significance of the demo is that 1) it's my first using Access 2007, and 2) it has some simple language swapping in it to change captions on controls on the forms from one language to another (English and Español only so far). I think we're going to be doing far more of that in the future. This is my first, very small step in that direction. 

Access Stress Test Data

Has this ever happened to you? You deploy a new database and everything is fine for a few weeks, or months. Eventually, though, users start to complain about slow response times and other problems. And they want you to fix it, NOW.

Have you ever wished you could do some really heavy duty stress tests before you put your application out there and head off  that kind of result?

Here's a tool to help you do just that.

A colleague of mine has packaged up several million rows of  sample data that you can download and adapt for use in your pre-release testing.

If you decided to use this data, we'd love to hear about your experiences with it.

ghepworth@gpcdata.com

Grover Park George on Creating Dynamic, Highly Formatted Reports

The July, 2008 meeting of the Pacific NW Access Developers Group (Pacific NW Access Developers Group) featured George's Presentation on partnering Access and Excel to create highly formatted, dynamic Excel reports from an Access database.

Download the Access to Excel Report Partners file to see the techniques discussed in George's presentation.

Grover Park George on Designing Functional Tables

Only the Names are Changed...

Did you know every database ever built uses the same ten tables*?

The May, 2006 Meeting of the Seattle Access Users Group (www.seattleaccess.org) featured George's presentation entitled Normalization for Normal People. George presented his taxonomy of the ten basic types of relational tables. Everyone needs to know how to create and use them properly.

Download the PowerPoint Presentation and Sample database to see what the buzz is all about.

*Attribute fields in these tables do vary slightly.

Grover Park George on Access

George's book has drawn rave reviews from readers. It's featured on Amazon.com and at most major bookstores.

You can also order your copy of Grover Park George on Access, a book for new Access users written by George Hepworth, owner of GPC Data direct from the author, (check or credit card). I'll pay your shipping costs within the continental US.

Search Amazon for other great books on Access.  Or Ask George  what books he has read and liked.

 GPC Solutions

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GPC  Free Stuff

Archive-CD's "Scanimator"  Interested in converting your paper files to CD's or DVD's? The "Scanimator" will help you estimate how many pages you have and how much time it will take to scan them (This 4.7MB download will take up to 2 hours over a 56K modem).

Free 30-Day Trial. Dish Network Installation Database. Check it out along with our other FREE DOWNLOADS!

Work Tracking Tool A free database created by GPC

Attendance and Hot Lunch Download the Trial version

Proposed Application Profile Tell us what you need

Select References Learn how a relational database can help your business

Get Free Help With your VBA or Access Applications

FREE Downloads from GPG on Access and the "Old"  Smart Access

Download the Sample Personal Contacts or Dynamic Menu Database from the book.

Read a Sample Chapter from Grover Park George On Access: Data Modeling 101

Requires Acrobat Reader.

Download the Dynamic Menu Demo Database This one was published with George's article in the June, 2004 issue of Smart Access Magazine.

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