Typographic Conventions Used in This Book

This book uses various typesetting styles to distinguish between explanatory and instructional text, text that you enter in dialogs (set in bold), and text that you enter in code-editing windows (set in monospace type).

Key Combinations, Menu Choices, and File Names

Key combinations that you use to perform Windows operations are indicated by joining the keys with a plus sign: Alt+F4, for example. In the rare cases when you must press and release a key, and then press another key, the keys are separated by a comma without an intervening space: Alt,F4. Shortcut key combinations appear as Ctrl+Key.

Sequences of individual menu items are separated by a comma: Edit, Cut.

File and folder names are initial-letter-capitalized in the text and headings of this book to conform with 32-bit Windows file-naming conventions and the appearance of file names in Windows Explorer.

SQL Statements and Keywords in Other Languages

SQL statements and code examples are set in a special monospace font. Keywords of SQL statements, such as SELECT, are set in all uppercase. Ellipses (...) indicate intervening programming code that isn't shown in the text or examples.

Square brackets in monospace type ([]) that appear within Jet SQL statements don't indicate optional items, as they do in syntax descriptions. In this case, the square brackets are used instead of quotation marks to frame a literal string or to allow use of a table and field names, such as [Order Details], that include embedded spaces or special punctuation, or field names that are identical to reserved words in VBA.

Typographic Conventions Used for VBA

This book uses a special set of typographic conventions for references to Visual Basic for Applications keywords in the presentation of VBA examples:

• Monospace type is used for all examples of VBA code, as in the following statement:

   Dim NewArray ( ) As Long ReDim NewArray (9, 9, 9) 

• Monospace type also is used when referring to names of properties of Access database objects, such as FormName.Width. The captions for text boxes and drop-down lists in which you enter values of properties, such as Source Connect String, are set in this book's regular textual font.

• Bold monospace type is used for all VBA reserved words and type-declaration symbols, as shown in the preceding example. Standard function names in VBA also are set in bold monospace type so that reserved words, standard function names, and reserved symbols stand out from variable and function names and values that you assign to variables.

• Italic monospace type indicates a replaceable item, as in

   Dim DataItem As String 

• Bold italic monospace type indicates a replaceable reserved word, such as a data type, as in

   Dim DataItem As DataType 

  DataItem is replaced by a keyword corresponding to the desired VBA data type, such as String or Variant.

• An ellipsis (...) substitutes for code not shown in syntax and code examples, as in

   If... Then... Else... End If 

• Braces ({}) enclosing two or more identifiers separated by the pipe symbol (|) indicate that you must choose one of these identifiers, as in

   Do {While|Until} ...Loop 

  In this case, you must use the While or Until reserved word in your statement, but not the braces or the pipe character.

• Three-letter prefixes to variable names indicate the VBA data type of the variable, such as bln for Boolean, str for String, and lng for Long (integer).

• Square brackets ([]) enclosing an identifier indicate that the identifier is optional, as in

   Set tblName = dbName.OpenTable(strTableName[, blnExclusive]) 

  Here, the blnExclusive flag, if set to True, opens the table specified by strTableName for exclusive use. blnExclusive is an optional argument. Don't include the brackets in any code that you type.

Typographic Conventions Used for VBScript

The few Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) examples of this book use lowercase monospace type for reserved words, a practice that originated in ECMAScript (JavaScript or Microsoft JScript). Variables are in mixed case with a data type prefix, despite the lack of VBScript support for data types other than Variant. Object, property, and method names included in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Document Object Model (DOM) standard also are in lower case. Most non-DOM objects, such as MSODSC.RecordsetDefs(), use mixed case.