Access 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference

Appendix E. The Access Object Model

By now you've probably read at least a few of the chapters in this book and have realized that there are a lot of tasks you can accomplish by programming in VBA. One concept that should be abundantly clear is that in order to use VBA to manipulate Access, you'll need to have some knowledge about the Access object model. We talked very briefly about object models in Chapter 5, but as a refresher, an object model is a set of objects and collections that programmers use to manipulate a program. Microsoft Access has a very rich object model. You'll use the Access object model to manipulate forms, reports, queries, macros, and other components of the Access interface.

As just about every component of the Access object model is related in some way to at least one other component, the following tables will also include information about related objects (both parent objects and child objects). For a graphical representation of the Access object model, you can search your hard drive for the file VBAAC10.hlp (the Microsoft Access Visual Basic Reference help file). As soon as you open that file, you'll see a graphical representation of the entire Access object model.

Much of the information within this appendix can be found in some form within the Access Visual Basic Reference Help file.