Searching for references in forms, reports and VBA scripts

[kylejmcintyre]

Hi,

I recently inherited a large database system that uses Access 2003 for its front-end and SQL Server 2005 for its storage engine. The system is in need of a lot of maintenance - there are many nasty denormalizations and dead tables in the database. Being new to Access development, my question is this: what are some good ways to search for references to a particular column or table within an Access project, including within forms, reports and VBA scripting? Being from a linux background, I'm wishing I could "grep" my access project for references to stuff that I think could be eliminated, consolidated etc, but given that Access projects are stored in binary files this approach isn't very feasible/fruitful.

Are there any good tools out there for viewing/searching an entire Access project other than Access itself? Or is this functionality present in access somewhere and I just haven't found it yet? I just hope there's some solution!

Thanks for any ideas,
Kyle

 

[boblarson]

Go get the Free V-Tools at:
http://www.skrol29.com/dev/en_vtools.htm
or, even better if you can afford it use Rick Fisher's Find and Replace (not free):

http://www.rickworld.com/products.html

 

[kylejmcintyre]

Thank you very much! That is exactly what I was looking for.