Clear out data (2 Viewers)

Thanks Pat. With a thousand forms/reports in my database, I am thinking about creating a detailed users manual. I suppose each form/report will need two pages to describe it. I hope to start working on the document when I finish building the database.
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.
 
And how many lookup tables do you have? And did you bother to look at the mini-app I provided a link to so that the maintenance of lookup tables can be managed simply without hundreds of tables and forms and queries to manage those tables.
A scan suggests that I have more than 140 lookup tables.

Sorry, I haven't looked at your mini-app yet. I had other subprojects in the queue. I created a hundred more forms last week. I will try my best to get to it soon. My research takes time, and I had to get up yesterday at 3:30 am to go the ER.
 
In recent weeks, food recalls have been front and center. What foods were recalled yesterday? Which recalls were Class 1?
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.
 
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.
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.

Most of the forms and reports will not need entries help after I explain them once or twice to family members. And I am not the person they want describing A1C or hemoglobin tests to them.
 
Sorry, I haven't looked at your mini-app yet. I had other subprojects in the queue. I created a hundred more forms last week. I will try my best to get to it soon. My research takes time, and I had to get up yesterday at 3:30 am to go the ER.
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.

I know we all emphasize consistency. Consistency is your friend. The more consistent your methods and coding style are, the less "thinking" and "decision making" you have to perform on the fly every time you start with a new task. If I come up with a method that is superior to the one I was using, I switch to the new method and then if appropriate, modify the old code when I have to maintain it. I almost never just go back and change old code UNLESS it is an efficiency problem. If a query runs for 10 minutes and I come up with a better method, I will take the time to replace the old version with the new, every place it is used because the payback is worth the effort. Obviously, the the new version fixes an error, that is also worth changing. AND keep in mind, that as you get better at this, it is easier for you to figure out when/how to reuse code/queries. So, if I fix old code that is slow, chances are excellent, I can fix it once and have it impact 20 procedures if the code is generic. If the code is not generic, I might take the time to make it generic now!
 
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, 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.

If you live in certain areas and you watch what you eat, you may never have a problem with contaminated food. The likelihood of you eating food contaminated by listeria or e-Coli is very small, I grant you that. I am a very cautious person. Since Covid hit in 2020, I have not traveled more than 10 miles from my house. It may be another year before I go further. I had five shots, and I am not against wearing a mask even now.
 
I call one the Master, but it is several months old. I have run out of space to put more buttons on it. I am waiting for large monitor support.
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.

Hard coding is your enemy. It forces you to create forms that are totally unnecessary and it forces you to make layout/coding changes that you would never have to make if the app were properly data driven.
 
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.

I know we all emphasize consistency. Consistency is your friend. The more consistent your methods and coding style are, the less "thinking" and "decision making" you have to perform on the fly every time you start with a new task. If I come up with a method that is superior to the one I was using, I switch to the new method and then if appropriate, modify the old code when I have to maintain it. I almost never just go back and change old code UNLESS it is an efficiency problem. If a query runs for 10 minutes and I come up with a better method, I will take the time to replace the old version with the new, every place it is used because the payback is worth the effort. Obviously, the the new version fixes an error, that is also worth changing. AND keep in mind, that as you get better at this, it is easier for you to figure out when/how to reuse code/queries. So, if I fix old code that is slow, chances are excellent, I can fix it once and have it impact 20 procedures if the code is generic. If the code is not generic, I might take the time to make it generic now!
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.

I am a visual thinker. All of my forms have graphics, and most of them have speech. That means that I probably have 500 images in my forms collection. When a form does not have a graphic, it has checkboxes or boxes for conditional formatting. One form has about 45 boxes with conditional formatting.

Yes, consistency is required. All of my forms use the same colors, fonts, and so they have the same look-and-feel. I do add fields to tables and objects to forms when I discover that I need something new. It took me a few weeks to find a recall announcement that included Class 1, 2, and 3. I added three Yes/No fields to the table, and I placed boxes and labels on the recall form. I had no idea that the government had a classification scheme like that. Now if an announcement says Class 1, I know that the recall is for a serious situation. Class 1 recalls may warn about the possibility of death or a long stay in the hospital. The keyword here is MAY.
 
I don't plan to be involved in maintaining the database once I send it out to my family members. It will be their job to add their personal financial and health data to the system.
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.
 
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.
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 developers, and I am not one.
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.
 
Since Covid hit in 2020, I have not traveled more than 10 miles from my house. It may be another year before I go further. I had five shots, and I am not against wearing a mask even now.
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.
 
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.

Hard coding is your enemy. It forces you to create forms that are totally unnecessary and it forces you to make layout/coding changes that you would never have to make if the app were properly data driven.
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.

When I have looked at the panes created by developers, I never see any of them working for me. With hundreds or thousands of forms, and hundreds or thousands of reports in a database, I need customized navigation panes.

I created a fancy pane three weeks ago. It has about 10 colorful shields. I place command buttons on them to open the forms. The forms are main forms with subforms. The subforms are continuous forms. Continuous forms are how I add normalization to the database. For example, the Grocery domain has a subform set to continuous. The subform lets me track my weekly grocery expenses. Some weeks, I go to Walmart twice. I may go to the Walmart west of my house or the one to the north. To distinguish them, I have a field in the form for location/address that uses a lookup table. It is not an MVF. Some here may ask why have a location field? Well, I want to know how far I drove to shop at stores during the year. That may not be important to other people, but it is to me. I also know most of the staff at one Walmart, they are my friends.

Except for pages on graphics on Bing, I have never seen any navigation panes. Several years ago, I got help from Lorenz Holscher in Germany. He took some of my forms apart and told me how to make them look professional by using an attractive font. He told me when to left justify and when to center text in boxes.

I also learned not to put borders around textboxes. Now I hate textboxes with borders, but I see them all the time. All of my textboxes use the Arial typeface, never some other typeface. That's interesting because I spent 25 years in the government, where Courier was it for all documents.
 
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.
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.

The one piece of code that I know I need in many of my forms/reports and in any new Accdb file is for text-to-speech. The interesting thing about that code is that it started life as a Word macro. I discovered it about two decades ago, I converted it to Access VBA, and I have been using it in Access ever since. I even used it once in an Excel workbook. Sorry, I had a weak moment because no one on my team was using Access.
 
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.
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.

I have had no Covid symptoms since it hit, but I stay away from people as much as possible. A couple of weeks ago, a worker at Walmart coughed twice in the area where I was shopping. I left the store without doing all of my shopping that day.

Last week, I was very pleased to see an elderly couple wearing masks at Walmart. I felt like thanking them for being good people.

I know that some people are more susceptible to diseases than others. I am glad that Covid stayed away from me, and I have done everything that I can to keep it away from others.

I have the same philosophy with food recalls. I tell family members anytime there is a recall in their state.
 
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, 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.
 
The visit record can have a field for the ExpenseID.

Honestly, I think you are wasting your time attempting to build an unmaintainable application. Healthy person ranges change over time. The latest and best disease information can be provided with a link to a web page like Mayo Clinic or WebMD. There are over 7,000 diseases. Plus, you are playing doctor which could be dangerous.

I don’t think you have accepted hardly any advice from the experts in this forum. Apparently you are very intelligent but this application is a rabbit hole.
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.

How would you recommend I get a handle this? So far, I have only done a small amount of research on a few diseases in my family, such as diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease. Is that a good way to proceed -- ask relatives and ignore other diseases?

When I have a list of diseases, I can study relevant tests in Mosby's Manual of Diagnostic and Laboratory Tests. Mosby's is over a thousand pages. I'll be up all night :cry:

Thanks.
 
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.

How would you recommend I get a handle this? So far, I have only done a small amount of research on a few diseases in my family, such as diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease. Is that a good way to proceed -- ask relatives and ignore other diseases?

When I have a list of diseases, I can study relevant tests in Mosby's Manual of Diagnostic and Laboratory Tests. Mosby's is over a thousand pages. I'll be up all night :cry:

Thanks.
I recommend you handle this by putting your intellectual talents into some other venture.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top Bottom