See also: Smart Tag Summaries (which use Smart Tag technology).

Smart Tags are a feature, which is only available for use with Microsoft Office XP applications.

Smart Tag technology works by recognising text as you type it, within applications such as Internet Explorer, Outlook, Word and Excel. If a piece of text you have typed is recognised, then a new Smart Tag menu can be accessed by clicking the right mouse button.

For example: You have written an email to your accounts department regarding a Customer in your Sales ledger. In the message you have written the Name or Code of the Customer record, exactly as it is entered in your Customer record. The Smart Tag would appear under the text and, from the Smart Tag menu, you could retrieve that Customer's balance and turnover summary or outstanding transactions.

Much of the implementation of Smart Tags is not visible to you, as a special data library (.dll file) watches over your actions, and displays the Tags when discovered. A small application is used to create the aliases (data values) that the Smart Tag system watches out for.

Once a Tag has been detected it will be highlighted, and a small menu will allow you to choose the data view you wish to see, to activate a query that will fetch the required data and display it in an Internet Browser window.

Smart Tags in action

The Access Smart Tag designer application creates and manages all the Smart Tag components, such as the Aliases; Style sheets and Query selections. The software pack comes with all the relevant information you need to install and use Smart Tag technique.

When an alias is discovered within any Office application, a Smart Tag indicator will be displayed, and when clicked will present a list of operations that you can perform. With Access Smart Tags, these are XML Stylesheets (graphical views) of the queried data.

With each tag you create, you can choose which Stylesheets are enabled.

Smart Tags are 'data recognisers' so you need to provide the data that enables them to watch out for and recognize the data you require.

At the foot of the Smart Tag Designer window is the Aliases button.

The Make Aliases for... window will be ready to create aliases for the module you had selected when the window was opened.

For a database with large volumes of data, criteria should be entered in the Make Aliases for... window, so that only matching data will be recognised by the Smart Tags and the amount of data processed is filtered to just that which is required. Criteria searches can be added to Account Codes, Account Names and Sort Keys.

To confirm that Access Smart Tags are active within your office applications, you need to double-check each application in turn. The new Office XP applications all contain a menu option on the Tools menu called AutoCorrect Options. Clicking the option will open a new pop up window containing a list of all the Smart Tags the system recognizes. Confirm that the Access tags can be seen.