Access startup options

There are two startup options that you can set to improve the performance of Microsoft Access for a database developer. Both are in the General tab under Options on the Tools menu.

Start by setting the Default database folder. If you leave this blank then Access will always start by offering you My Documents as a home folder for your database. All our work lives in folders under d:\Projects so setting the default correctly saves us a couple of seconds by not having to navigate there from My Documents. It's only a couple of seconds but we save those seconds over and over again day after day.

The second thing to fix on this tab is Track name AutoCorrect Info. This feature sounds very useful for developers but it's slow and suffers from a number of faults. The idea of Autocorrect is that it helps you when you have to change the name of an object in Microsoft Access. If you realise that a textbox should have been called "Town" rather than "Addr3" then Autocorrect will detect your change and keep the project consistent by changing all the code that refers to "Addr3".

This sounds like a very good idea but if you visit Microsoft's Help and Support page and search for "track name autocorrect" then you'll see the problems. In particular, issue 200600 confesses that:

If a database has the Name AutoCorrect feature enabled, users may experience a delay when they try to open database objects.

Turn it off and try to get the names right in the design phase.

Note that this problem does not affect the regular spell check on the Tools menu.