hi, im new to access and have just spent the last few weeks reading loads of books on the subject; what im hoping to acheive is a database used by a taxi cab company which allows the telephone operators to enter new jobs into it and then give them out via a radio/data thingy were getting. ive got to far ahead of my self already. ive played around with a few different tables and now am trying to develop a booking screen which allows the operators to input jobs to a table but also shows the results in another form(?) on the same screen.
so as soon as they have put the job in, it appears at the bottom of the screen in a list. i think both of these need to be forms connected to a joblog table but how do i have multiple forms on the one screen? These operators have NO experience with ms access or any other ms product, all they know is how to type stuff into boxes so i could do with this database being as simple as possible. ive seen a few finished databases which look like individual programs, just a few well made forms and one or two queries, minus all the database and ms menus. in fact i think they were .exe files; anyone know has this is done?

The .exe files are probably made in Visual basic or some other program. However, you can make your database look very much like a program with "database tools|startup" (transl. from swedish) and, like you say, a few well designed forms.

If I were you, I´d make a form that fills the screen and has a listbox control in the bottom (if that´s where you want it). The list takes its data from the jobtable (or a query on that table).

Within the form, you put a subform which is based on the job table and designed for data entry. To see the jobs directly in the list you probably need to use the "refresh" statement.

I´m not sure if this will refer to the right form, but hopefully it does:

In the "lost focus" (transl. from swedish) event of the last field to be filled in (you quide this with tab index) in the subform, put

Me.refresh

(Of course you can have seperate forms also, but I would prefer this solution if this is all you need.)

Fuga.

[This message has been edited by Fuga (edited 04-19-2002).]

thanks for the reply, yeah what im hoping for is just the one screen with a few different forms on it; this is just the begining im also going to need a box giving my constantly updated info on the position and status of my cars as well as one or two other things. Looks like there no way round it im gonna have to learn some visual basic!

Yes, it sounds like you´ve got your work cut out for you.

Good luck!

Fuga.