Receiving Serial Port Info in MS Access

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Terry Hale - 15 Dec 2006 05:58 GMT

Greetings,
I have an Access application that i would like to add live GPS data to.
Visual Basic has an ActiveX control that allows you to read the data stream
bursts being delivered to a serial port. That control, MScomm32.ocx is not
licensed to work with Access. There appear to be third party workarounds
that may permit some modified version of the Comm control to work in Access,
but they do not appear straight-forward. Is anyone aware of any Microsoft
provisions to permit Access to poll serial ports for data transmission?
Could some Guru positively confirm that no such beast exists?
Thanks, Terry

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Douglas J. Steele - 15 Dec 2006 10:42 GMT

I'm not aware of any restrictions that prevent you from using mscomm32.ocx
with Access.

Take a look at what Tony Toews has to say about Access and serial port
communication at http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/serialport.htm

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Doug Steele, Microsoft Access MVP
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> Greetings,
> I have an Access application that i would like to add live GPS data to.
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
> Could some Guru positively confirm that no such beast exists?
> Thanks, Terry

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Thomas Lutz - 08 Jan 2007 18:05 GMT

In order to use the MSComm32.OCX ActiveX control in Access, you first
need to have a developer license for the control. To get the license,
you would need to have Microsoft Visual Studio 6 installed on the
workstation where you want to use the ActiveX control. You would also
need to write code for the control to get everything to work the way
you want. If you are a good VBA programmer and understand how the
MSComm32.OCX control works then you should not have too much trouble.
If you are looking for an easier solution, then you might want to look
at a produce called WinWedge from TAL Technologies. WinWedge is an
executable program that is designed to run in the background and feed
serial data directly to other application programs using Dynamic Data
Exchange (DDE). Access has excellent support for DDE so WinWedge would
be a great tool to use to interface a GPS receiver to an Access
application. For more information about WinWedge visit:
http://www.taltech.com/products/winwedge.html

>Greetings,
> I have an Access application that i would like to add live GPS data to.
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
> Could some Guru positively confirm that no such beast exists?
> Thanks, Terry

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