Product Review - Total Access Speller For Access 2002

Pinnacle Publishing.com, Mike Gunderloy, January 29, 2002

Total Access Speller for Microsoft Access 2002, $199 FMS, Inc.

I had a chance to put the new version of Total Access Speller through its paces recently, and it performed perfectly. You may be wondering why you need an add-on spell checker when Access has its own built in. The answer, of course, is to check the things that Access won't: specifically, your user interface. Ever delivered an application to a client and THEN discovered that you spelled "iventory" wrong on the main form? Yeah, it's embarrassing.

TA Speller is designed to save you from that "oops" sensation. It works as an add-on for Access databases (though not for projects). In operation, it's simple: Pick the objects you want to check, pick the properties you want to check, and turn it loose. TA Speller builds a table of all the property values and invokes the built-in Access speller to check it. This gives you the benefit of any changes you've made to the dictionary without having to re-enter them.

The product works as advertised, and quickly found a few mistakes in the applications I tested it on. The user interface is a trifle confusing, because, of course, the spell-checker shows you the field name that FMS chose in building their table, and you may wonder what "Ignore 'txtPropertyValue' field" is all about. But that's the only rough edge I found in a very useful product.