Comments

# Steve Palm said on January 29, 2008 10:58 PM:

This video is very well done and touches on several key features of Access.  This should give users a better idea of what Access is capable of and as we all know Access can do a lot more than that.  I can attest to the power and flexibility of Access having worked in it every day since its first release in 1992.  

I can remember starting out with something very basic like this in Access 1.0 to track my customers and orders for another business I had.  As time went on I kept enhancing the program and began selling it to other businesses showing them what Access could do.  

Now 15 years later that program is commercially used by people throughout the world.  It has grown greatly since the Access 1.0 days to include more than 375 tables, 275 relationships, 1,550 queries, 650 forms, 350 reports and over 9,000 functions and sub procedures.

I think these videos are great to show others that Access can do so much more than simply store records.  It can easily run your business and is by far one of the best database and RAD programming environments on the market today.  

The fact that Access includes a powerful relational database, form and report designer along with a full featured programming language all in one package is amazing.  I hope many more people continue to learn about the power of Access.

Steve

# Gilad said on January 30, 2008 6:01 AM:

I would like to make an additional comment to the post from 22 January on “Video demo: make controls grow and shrink”. As new comments are already disabled there please excuse me for continuing the discussion here:

The last comment was written by Steve Palm.

Steve, I agree with you that “the new Anchoring feature in Access 2007 is great and long overdue”. But I disagree with you on the lack of benefit with resizing forms on startup. What you are suggesting is that if a form will be too small for a screen on some user’s machine, then they can drag the forms borders to resize it, and then all the controls will grow accordingly and move proportionally, without changing the font size.

But this will require an extra move on the part of the user. What the mentioned code in the above discussion does, is resize the form automatically so the user does not need to do anything. I assume if I were a user using such an application that required me to resize each and every form after opening it each time, it would be bothersome and I would just probably opt to leave it as it is, small and inappropriate for my screen setting and uncomfortable. Both options of either deliberately resizing it or alternatively leaving it as is, are less friendly then having the form resize automatically as it opens so I wouldn’t have to do anything and get the from to spread accross my screen optimally.

That is what I have now working for me after tweaking the mentioned code and it is works well. I just wish it could happen without code because as you say; it could “slow a complex form down and it is more prone to quirks”, and just makes my application more difficult to handle and maintain.

That is just what I think

Gilad

# Steve Palm said on January 30, 2008 10:18 AM:

Hi Gilad,

You can solve that problem by saving the position and size of each Form to a table or windows registry and then setting it the next time the users opens that form.  This way the user only has to size the form 1 time and from that point forward it is always opened to the size they set it.  An API call to the MoveWindow can be used to do this and it works very well.  

Steve

# Weddings said on June 5, 2008 11:31 AM:

We just released a polished video geared towards explaining the why someone should use Access. Here is the introduction: Tired of juggling your business contact data among an address book, lists of orders, file folders, and ledgers? An Access databas

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