If you decide to add "help" that is accessible by ? buttons, Create the help in a table so if you need to describe blood pleasure in more than one place, you only need ONE help entry for it. You can create text abbreviations or you can use numbers that are hardcoded. Something must connect each ? button with a help entry.
A scan suggests that I have more than 140 lookup tables.
What planet do you live on? I can't think of a single food recall that has ever affected me personally and I've been cooking for the family for 60+ years.
Pat, that's a great idea. I also use text-to-speech to communicate with users. There's usually one Speak icon on every form. The Recall Map form has three Speak icons because I got carried away on it.
Some research should take priority. I'm not saying that you should immediately go back and remove all your unnecessary lookup tables. You can leave them alone until such time as you have to do maintenance on a form that uses one of them. Then convert only that single table. But start IMMEDIATELY using the mini-app for all new lookups and save yourself from having to create all those new tables and forms. Baby steps. Eventually, you may want to fix all your earlier poor choices but there is no reason to stress about doing them now since that will interfere with moving on. Learn as you go. Adopt new ideas for new parts of the app.
Pat, today go to the Newsweek website and check food recalls. No, go to the CDC and FDA. Better yet register for recall announcements at all of these sites. I am seeing a recall announcement almost every day.
A larger monitor is not the solution. It is not necessary to see every option for every group on a single screen as you showed with the picture on #16. It is that picture that makes your app look worse than it is. It is like you are trying to put an entire table of contents on a single form. Why would that every be necessary? Would you ever do that with a book of any size? If something is small enough in scope, then that type of view might be usable but not for many things. A TOC that you see on a web app might be better. It expands as you click. The nice thing about it is that you NEVER need to hard code forms. Each expansion opens a "list". The data for the "list" is obtained from a table. The table has sorting and grouping fields so if you want to move something around, you change the sorting/grouping values AND, you can even organize the TOC that a section might show up in multiple locations if that makes sense.
Pat, I don't code. I have a little code in my Personal Finance and Health database, but I rarely use it. I use macros instead. I am forced to use code for text-to-speech, but that's about it. Code is for developers, and I am not one.
And do you expect them to import new objects and manually modify table descriptions when new fields are necessary? ALL useful applications are living/breathing things and will require maintenance even once fully functional. By insisting on keeping all functionality in a single database, you are exacerbating the problem. Very few of your tables will overlap. Even if you split the app into functions, you could still keep a common table BE and functional BE's so that each FE might be linked to two or more BE's, the common BE and the function al BE. Access has no restriction on the number of BE's. Each table could be in a separate BE but that would be extremely unusual and only useful if the tables get to be huge in size. An Access db is limited to 2M. What that really means is that the size of a single table is limited to 2M. Your Access app could have 20 2M BE databases essentially making the BE 40M. That alone will simplify your maintenance.
That is also a huge mistake. Macros are significantly harder to create and logically confusing compared to code. Code (at least VBA) mimics English and the logic you use when thinking about how to do a task. You just don't know that because you have handicapped yourself to use only macros. The mini-app for table maintenance has very little code.
Code is for people who are not masochists. You are crippling yourself by using macros rather than code. You are also forcing yourself to think illogically because macros are not logical. You are preventing yourself from reusing code because nobody reuses macros. They are too clumsy and hard to reuse.
Then you actually know very little about COVID. But we've covered that in other threads so we won't go into it here. You have crippled yourself because you allowed the lame-stream media to terrify you. Remember the mantra for the media - "if it bleeds, it leads". They live and die by this. So, their objective is always to exaggerate scarry stuff so they can terrify you into more clicks. You are only click bait to them. Statistically - the early models were waaaaaaaaaaaaaay off target and no one backed off or apologized for the early mistakes. The elderly and the ill were in jeopardy of dying from COVID but the young and health were in significantly less risk. In fact, children are at far more risk from the vaccine than they are from the disease itself. The early death counts were significantly inflated because of the rules posted by the CDC for how COVID deaths should be counted in addition to the federal payments for anyone treating anyone even potentially infected with COVID. These two "rules" greatly inflated the actual death count and much of that has been cleaned up in the ensuing years. For at least the first year, we had no valid test to determine if you were infected. Therefore, if you had even minor symptoms or could have had COVID and you died, you were reported as a death FROM COVID. So, we have many traffic accidents listed as death FROM COVID. During the first three years of COVID, few people died of the flu. Hmmmm. Strange.
Thanks, Pat. I am always looking for better ways to design forms and reports. I created the screenshot in #16 mainly for me. I won't expose it to family members because it has too many buttons. I know that. Over the past few months, I created several other navigation panes. I have shown some of them to family members, but they know none of those forms will work down the road.
With macros that open forms and reports, I create them from scratch in a few seconds. It's so easy. Then if I need to reuse them, it is just Copy and Paste. I copy macros from one form to another, and from one database to another without changing anything. They can be difficult to create, but I stay away from those uses.
Interesting, I was getting ready to go back out in public last month when I had a talk with my neighbor. He told me that one of his friends attended an event in the city recently. The person came down with Covid and died. Another friend told me someone else he knows came down with the disease. I don't know if that person died or not. I have a friend in California who has had Covid twice. His cognitive abilities have been seriously impacted.
That's a good idea. Do you have any extras?
Pat, I tell my family members that I am from the dark side of the moon. One of my friend's ashes are up there. I would love for NASA to bury me near him. The smartest person that I have ever worked around.
Duane, this afternoon, I pulled out my copy of Mosby's Manual and I started looking through all the medical tests. Then I looked at Wayback to find a list of the 7.000 diseases. I am blown away by all of the tests and diseases.
