Why This Chapter Is Important
Although Access is a very powerful product, both the development and runtime environments lack numerous features. Fortunately, Microsoft left both Access and the development environment open enough to allow third-party vendors to step in and fill important gaps. Several third-party vendors have created tools to enhance both the development and runtime environments of Microsoft Access. The biggest challenge in working with third-party tools is ensuring their reliability and stability. Although there are many reputable third-party vendors of Access tools out there, I have found the products produced by FMS Inc. (http://www.fmsinc.com) and DBI Technologies (http://www.dbi-tech.com) to be particularly useful. The products produced by these companies save countless hours of development time for me and my development team, and they enhance the applications that we build. This chapter covers my favorite third-party tools produced by these vendors. Visit their Web sites for more information, including demo downloads.