an ms office programming experience
Written 12 Feb 2004
The last few days were very busy. I've learned more about the internals of MS Access' security model than I ever cared, or thought, to. My goal was to create a report detailing the security permissions graned each user and group within a secured database. At first I decided to use MS Word to write the report, big mistake! After letting the report run for 1.5 hours (it only takes 45 seconds to actually retrieve the permissions) I decided to kill it.
A bit of testing (removing the display of the permissions) revealed a monster report of 415 pages, listing the users, containers and documents. Adding the 10-15 permissions each document has explains why MS Word bombed. It's never worked well for me with large documents.
Switching to MS Excel worked. The report looks much better and it only takes 1.5 minutes to create the report. Very nice. It's still large, at 520 pages, but it is by all means complete. It makes me wish I could see the look on the Corp auditors face when she opens the report :)