Converting macro-based menus

In the good old days (or bad, depending on your viewpoint) before Access 97 if you wanted to create a custom menu, shortcut menu, or toolbar in Access you had to create some macros. Indeed, in this author's opinion this was the only reason to play with macros other than AutoExec and AutoKeys. But times changes, and these days menus and toolbars are created as separate constructs (Tools, Customize, Toolbars). So if you're upgrading from an old version you have a lot of rewriting to do, right?

Wrong! Well, maybe in Access 97 you have, but from Access 2000 onwards the work has been done for you. All you have to do is this. In the database window, click Macros and highlight the name of the macro you want to create a menu or toolbar from. You only need to select the top-level macro; there's no need to select the macro group for each menu that appears on the menu bar. Then, on the Tools menu, select Macro, and then click either Create Menu from Macro, Create Toolbar from Macro or Create Shortcut Menu from Macro, depending on what you want to do.

The important things to remember though is that you can't then go ahead and delete the original macro after creating the new menu/toolbar - this is because it still depends on the original macro to run (unless the original macro only contained AddMenu or RunCommand actions). If you want to do away with the macro altogether, you need to convert the macro actions to VBA code, then modify the menu/toolbar you've just created to use the new VBA functions rather than the old macro actions.