Access Pacific User Group -- Create Auditing in an Access Database with 3 Mouse Clicks

[GPGeorge]

Please join us for our Monthly Chapter Presentation November 6, 2025, at 6:30PM Pacific (UTC -8)

With an assist from my team of personal assistants, Claude and Chatty, I created a three step process to add lightweight auditing to an Access database application. It’s built on Data Macros to ensure data changes are captured whether entered through forms or by action queries or in VBA.

Step one: Create the Admin tables required

1. Audit table to track additions, modifications and deletions, including Long Text fields, which are not natively supported by Data Macros
2. Configuration table to identify tables and fields eligible for audit.
3. LongTextBackup table to support auditing of Long Text fields.

Step two: Populate the configuration table with tables, fields, datatypes and Primary Key values for the current database

Step three: Build the three Data Macros for each eligible table.

1. AfterInsert
2. AfterUpdate
3. AfterDelete

I’ll demo the resulting audit function in a client application.

I’ll share the module that builds the audit function after the meeting.

If time permits, I’ll add an admin interface for the process. As it stands now, I run three Sub procedures from the immediate window in the VBE.

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[GPGeorge]

Join me tonight for a demo of what I like to call "Light-weight Audit Logging" for an Access database application.

Using the code co-created with my Claude AI assistant, you can create the objects and code with 3 mouse clicks plus a bit of copy/paste. If you want to try your hand at automating the final step, I'll provide the source code on my GitHub site. You might want to wait to download the code until after the meeting in case any last-minute changes get added based on feedback during the presentation.