Access On New Computer

[NauticalGent]

The the chart is great but it merely proves exactly my point -

I gave my thumbs up because seeing the "evolution" of Access intrigued me. If I had my "druthers", I would have MS rollback to 2010 and start from there with the strict injunction that they could not remove anything...

 

[DickyP]

I've almost gotten used to the ribbon after 17 years but I still really miss the Access database container. It was far more functional than the Nav pain (sic). All it needed was a better search. Far fewer clicks to do anything.re.

Purely apocryphal in that we are now 14+ years on but I was told as an aside by an MS employee at slough that the team given the task of converting the menu system to xml, refused to talk to the team responsible for the menus in office and just said huge chunks of functionality were pointless so didn't bother. The same person also said that the reason the picture manager was abandoned was because the only programmer left who maintained it retired, and nobody else understood the code. This is all third hand so take with a pinch or grain (select as preferred) of salt.

 

[Isaac]

I gave my thumbs up because seeing the "evolution" of Access intrigued me. If I had my "druthers", I would have MS rollback to 2010 and start from there with the strict injunction that they could not remove anything...

Yep, agree. 2007 or 2010 I would take indefinitely. The rest is just UI changes-for-the-sake-of-changes crap

 

[KitaYama]

I'm not surprised when someone new to Access or ribbon talks like this, but when experts here insist on preferring using traditional menus over ribbons, I'm simply shocked. No offence, but if anyone thinks the traditional menus were better and more useful than current ribbon, I say you don't know how to use a ribbon.
I've had this discussion with isladogs before. It's buried somewhere here, and I don't want to go through the same routine, just adding some points.

In a ribbon, you can add Checkboxes, Toggle buttons, Textboxes, Combo boxes, Galleries and Split buttons which I don't think menu system could have them.
And if you add a sub menu, you can have Toggle buttons and checkboxes in them too. (Again I don't think it was possible in a menu)

One of the most interesting aspects of controls on a ribbon, is that they can have a super tip, something that traditional menu system lacked. (at least with this quality). A super tip can be a help file or a complete explanation of how the control works. A super tip can be multi line, and styled with html.

However, some applications use custom add-ins or third-party tools to enhance the ribbon functionality. These add-ins can provide more advanced features, such as displaying images or even GIFs when hovering over controls. This involves programming with the Office Add-in framework, which allows developers to create custom UI elements and behaviors.
Check the following gif. A mouse over a control, shows a clip on how the control is supposed to be used.

I understand that the reason the MS team went with the Ribbon instead of the menus was because they were easier to manage. Well, maybe for them but not for us. The best menuing system is one that is data driven so instead of writing code, you just add rows to a table or rearrange them if you want to change the sorting and grouping.

That is the exact way a ribbon works.
Most of our databases have 4 user defined tables (tblRibbons, tblTabs, tblGroups & tblcontrols) that is joined to a users level table.
On each login, a function reads the preferences and privileges of users and reconstruct the ribbon's XML according to their preferred language. Their ribbon contains only the buttons they are allowed to use.
Adding new tabs, groups or controls is done only by adding a new record to one of the tables. We don't need to go through an xml file with more than a thousands lines, search for an specific control to edit, delete or add a new control.

When you login to one of our databases, the menu can be one of 8 possible languages. After login to FE, a function with less than 50 lines of code, reads the controls from a query with above tables joined, creates the necessary xml code that only contains the controls you are allowed to use, in your preferred language, and sets this XML as the application's ribbon.
What else do you need? You only add controls to the table, nothing else.

I think I've shared a sample database there and I don't repeat it here, just check how a dynamic ribbon works.

I can't remember how I used to add a menu to a database, so for anyone who remembers I have 2 questions: (genuine question)

• Were you able to have a multi language menu? For example when a French logs in to db, all the menu change to French, or to German for someone who is more comfortable with German than English. Was it possible?
• Could you hide some menus or sub menus for some users with less privileges?

 

[Isaac]

menus were better and more useful than ribbon

some of us are rabidly fast (in other words, extremely fast) keyboarders. the alt shortcuts were our lifeline.

regardless, i said i like 2007 and 2010. which have ribbon. I have only a tiny bit of ill-will against ribbon at this time

 

[Isaac]

Could you hide some menus or sub menus for some users with less privileges?

Sure, just use a tab control and make tab pages visible or invisible or change them back if no security, simple

 

[KitaYama]

Sure, just use a tab control and make tab pages visible or invisible or change them back if no security, simple

Tab control? Tab control belongs to forms, I think.
I had a feeling the discussion was about menu.
Did menu (at the top of the application) have tab controls?
(sorry for the stupid question. I can't remember.)

 

[KitaYama]

some of us are rabidly fast (in other words, extremely fast) keyboarders. the alt shortcuts were our lifeline.

Well, it's still available in ribbon.
You can add a Keytip property to a control.

<button id="customButton" label="My Button" keytip="B" />

Pressing Alt+B will fire its event.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

I gave my thumbs up because seeing the "evolution" of Access intrigued me. If I had my "druthers", I would have MS rollback to 2010 and start from there with the strict injunction that they could not remove anything...

I don't know about that. I just think A97 and then A2003 were very mature and you could whatever you wanted with them, pretty much.

Later versions added in new features such as formatted text boxes, form control anchoring, new ribbons instead of menus. I doubt there is any way that later versions can manipulate data, though, that couldn't be done in the A97/2003 versions.

However if you are forced to upgrade to W11, and maybe 64bit office you may be faced with a situation where you have to update the database for compatibility reasons. It may be automatically done by building in a later version. However you can't change A97 to A2023 without converting to A2003 first. You might have included code units that only work in 32bit office, so the developer has to solve the problem for their users.

There is so much important legacy software that companies use, that it's going to be a very expensive and difficult fix in many cases.

It's a bit like complaining that modern bluray players can't play VHS tapes, and what are you going to do about it, Panasonic?

 

[gemma-the-husky]

I'm not surprised when someone new to Access or ribbon talks like this, but when experts here insist on preferring using traditional menus over ribbons, I'm simply shocked. No offence, but if anyone thinks the traditional menus were better and more useful than current ribbon, I say you don't know how to use a ribbon.
I've had this discussion with isladogs before. It's buried somewhere here, and I don't want to go through the same routine, just adding some points.

In a ribbon, you can add Checkboxes, Toggle buttons, Textboxes, Combo boxes, Galleries and Split buttons which I don't think menu system could have them.
And if you add a sub menu, you can have Toggle buttons and checkboxes in them too. (Again I don't think it was possible in a menu)

One of the most interesting aspects of controls on a ribbon, is that they can have a super tip, something that traditional menu system lacked. (at least with this quality). A super tip can be a help file or a complete explanation of how the control works. A super tip can be multi line, and styled with html.


View attachment 115302

However, some applications use custom add-ins or third-party tools to enhance the ribbon functionality. These add-ins can provide more advanced features, such as displaying images or even GIFs when hovering over controls. This involves programming with the Office Add-in framework, which allows developers to create custom UI elements and behaviors.
Check the following gif. A mouse over a control, shows a clip on how the control is supposed to be used.

View attachment 115301

View attachment 115304




That is the exact way a ribbon works.
Most of our databases have 4 user defined tables (tblRibbons, tblTabs, tblGroups & tblcontrols) that is joined to a users level table.
On each login, a function reads the preferences and privileges of users and reconstruct the ribbon's XML according to their preferred language. Their ribbon contains only the buttons they are allowed to use.
Adding new tabs, groups or controls is done only by adding a new record to one of the tables. We don't need to go through an xml file with more than a thousands lines, search for an specific control to edit, delete or add a new control.

When you login to one of our databases, the menu can be one of 8 possible languages. After login to FE, a function with less than 50 lines of code, reads the controls from a query with above tables joined, creates the necessary xml code that only contains the controls you are allowed to use, in your preferred language, and sets this XML as the application's ribbon.
What else do you need? You only add controls to the table, nothing else.

I think I've shared a sample database there and I don't repeat it here, just check how a dynamic ribbon works.

I can't remember how I used to add a menu to a database, so for anyone who remembers I have 2 questions: (genuine question)

• Were you able to have a multi language menu? For example when a French logs in to db, all the menu change to French, or to German for someone who is more comfortable with German than English. Was it possible?
• Could you hide some menus or sub menus for some users with less privileges?

I find the ribbon issue is that the icons are just too big. A drop down menu was a few pixels high to start off. Dropping down a 10 option menu only used a little screen space.

How do you provide a sub ribbon, and how many options can it contain. Is it a vertical structure, or another horizontal structure?

As an example I find it a real pain to add controls to a form from a ribbon, because not all the controls are visible, and the icons are so clunky.

 

[DickyP]

I'm not surprised when someone new to Access or ribbon talks like this, but when experts here insist on preferring using traditional menus over ribbons, I'm simply shocked. No offence, but if anyone thinks the traditional menus were better and more useful than current ribbon, I say you don't know how to use a ribbon.

Whereas I would say you never really understood menus. Ribbons are merely intrusive, inflexible menus.

You can't put Ribbons where you want them, you can't have floating ribbons to name but a few of the inflexibilities of ribbons.

In a ribbon, you can add Checkboxes, Toggle buttons, Textboxes, Combo boxes, Galleries and Split buttons which I don't think menu system could have them.
And if you add a sub menu, you can have Toggle buttons and checkboxes in them too. (Again I don't think it was possible in a menu)
(at least with this quality).

All these you can do on menus and you can build them as you go if you wish. To be honest after 17 years of Ribbons they have been refined down to be far less intrusive and to work far more like menus did. And their usage far better suited to Access than to Word and Excel where their implementation is spoiled by the what is included where and with what. In Word for example, as supplied, to effectively use tables you have to go to three different tabs!

And my biggest personal gripe with Ribbons in Word was it forced the OED to abandon their Add-in because they couldn't commit the resource to a complete redesign. I enjoyed having a real UK dictionary spellchecker and reference, rather than Microsoft's flawed American view of UK English.

However, as I said when I stared this - the ship has long since sailed. I still have Office 2003 on my Laptop and if I'm in a hurry to create Word documents I use this and subsequently save as .docx etc.

 

[KitaYama]

How do you provide a sub ribbon,

As far as I know, there's no sub ribbon. You can have as many ribbon as you like, but no sub ribbon. Ribbon has tabs. you can add as many tabs as you like and control them from your forms and classes.

I find the ribbon issue is that the icons are just too big. A drop down menu was a few pixels high to start off. Dropping down a 10 option menu only used a little screen space.

The height of overall ribbon is fixed. But you can use two types as of controls on ribbon. You don't like the large controls, you can use small controls. See bellow image.

Is it a vertical structure, or another horizontal structure?

This is the main problem with those who are not familliar with ribbons. Recent monitors are wider. So the point is to put items horizontally, because you have more horizontally space in your monitor than vertically.
If you insist to go vertically, (which ruins the purpose of using a ribbon) you have two options. Using menu control, and button group control. You can use one or both as many as you like to create something similar to a traditional menus.

But it ruins the purpose of using ribbon. In a ribbon controls are visible to user and they can interact with these controls easily. Why you insist on hiding your controls deep in several layers of menus and sub menus? Why not putting them somewhere that can be reached easily?

 

[KitaYama]

All these you can do on menus and you can build them as you go if you wish.

As I said, I don't remember the menu and how it worked.
Can you show some images of a menu with checkboxes, textboxes or toggle buttons?
I'd like to see a floating menu as well if possible.

thanks.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

As far as I know, there's no sub ribbon. You can have as many ribbon as you like, but no sub ribbon. Ribbon has tabs. you can add as many tabs as you like and control them from your forms and classes.


The height of overall ribbon is fixed. But you can use two types as of controls on ribbon. You don't like the large controls, you can use small controls. See bellow image.


This is the main problem with those who are not familliar with ribbons. Recent monitors are wider. So the point is to put items horizontally, because you have more horizontally space in your monitor than vertically.
If you insist to go vertically, (which ruins the purpose of using a ribbon) you have two options. Using menu control, and button group control. You can use one or both as many as you like to create something similar to a traditional menus.

View attachment 115310

But it ruins the purpose of using ribbon. In a ribbon controls are visible to user and they can interact with these controls easily. Why you insist on hiding your controls deep in several layers of menus and sub menus? Why not putting them somewhere that can be reached easily?

Well, I think they can be reached easily in a menu system, but you can't see everything at the same time.

For example, I built an enormous sales order processing system with hundreds of forms. If somebody wanted to enter a sales order they didn't need to be looking at the product and sales unit management area, so there was one menu tab for sales orders, and another for table maintenance, another for customer and customer branch maintenance, and so on.

Probably 20 or more forms in some of those sections, so not just one sub menu, but a hierarchical tree of sub menus.

Why would you want to see all your menu options at the same time? You don't see all your data at the same time. In fact you hardly ever see all the data in a single table. You don't see every page in a website at the same time. You have a navigation system that helps you find the correct page.

 

[KitaYama]

refined down to be far less intrusive and to work far more like menus did

The purpose of ribbon is not to work like menus. The purpose is to create something that can interact with the user and application. It seems you're determined to compare ribbon to menu, not looking for more possibilities (and maybe sacrificing some functionalities). Did you see my gif above?

 

[KitaYama]

If somebody wanted to enter a sales order they didn't need to be looking at the product and sales unit management area, so there was one menu tab for sales orders, and another for table maintenance, another for customer and customer branch maintenance, and so on.

You can do the same by adding tabs, and adding necessary controls in each tab.
Or adding several combo boxes for each on a single tab. Isn't working with a combo box easier than going to a menu and its submenus?
Or add a tab and use button group.

Note: It's just my side of how I see it. You may be more comfortable with menu. I don't argue which one is better. I just say think about new possibilities that a ribbon adds to your application.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

@KitaYama
I think that's just semantics. A navigation system of any sort is equivalent to a menu, and a large system just cannot display every option at the same time, so you need a way to drill down through the options.

If you add combo boxes you need to work out how and where to display and fill the combo boxes.

With a data aware menu system, all you need is to populate a menu page with the options you want to offer and the rest is automatic. No additional programming is necessary.

You can enhance the A2003 menu system to take into account a users group membership and thereby determine whether certain menu options are displayed, not displayed, displayed but jnactive or even displayed but read-only.

I'm sure you can do all this with ribbons as well, but the ribbons just take up too much screen real estate in my opinion.

Perhaps I'm a luddite and there is a slicker way.

 

[DickyP]

As I said, I don't remember the menu and how it worked.
Can you show some images of a menu with checkboxes, textboxes or toggle buttons?
I'd like to see a floating menu as well if possible.

thanks.

Next time I log on to my Laptop I print off some images. The floating menu will come first as I'll have to hunt for more complicated menus on my old BU hdds, since I seldom needed them.

What I didn't cover in my post was bit further down yours. Your description of multi level security is nothing to do with ribbons versus menus - as it used to be built in albeit not in 2003, and needed long re-inventing before ribbons.

And your language change on the fly would be easily implement on menus - the logic would be no different to using on ribbons. Check language at start-up and apply menus, sub-menus as appropriate. Here again the subject matter is not really a menu/ribbon comparison.

 

[DickyP]

I'd like to see a floating menu as well if possible.

thanks.

As promised.

Next time I log on to my Laptop I print off some images. The floating menu will come first

In reality all menus are floating - you just dock them where you want or drag into the main area.

 

[KitaYama]

As promised.

Next time I log on to my Laptop I print off some images. The floating menu will come first

View attachment 115311View attachment 115312

In reality all menus are floating - you just dock them where you want or drag into the main area.

Thanks. But aren't they toolbars and not menu?

Menus are the one at the top of the application.