Customer Enrty Form Design

[cpberg1]

Please excuse my photo editing job!

Win 7
Access 03
New user but active DB admin and learning fast

I'm having issues with a small group of end users who despite training manage to create havoc with the customer list in DB. My form design obviously needs to be more robust to alleviate some of the issues.

Working with a customer list and information form. The textbox on the top is used to filter the customer list on the left side so you can initially tell if a customer is already in the database. If they are, then select the record from the list and amend the record appropriately. If they are not, click the "add new record" command button and start typing in the data.

The giant yellow textbox on top tells you which record you are currently working with.

Issues I'm having
1. Duplicate records being created. Stems from user not checking the list first. Perhaps I hide the "general" page until a record is selected from the list or created? The challenge I can see with that is rarely we do have two different customers with the same name and you'll need to see the general information to determine if it actually is the correct customer.
2. Blank records being created. Annoying but not a major problem, as I can delete them once in awhile.
3. Biggest issue! Customer data being overwritten. While on the record for Chris Berg for example a user can/has input the data in the form for Some, Otherguy. Obviously a major problem with my form design. I can put a button to save data but my concern is that the end user just clicks the button to overwrite anyway. Perhaps lock down some of the fields once the record is originally created? It seems very obvious to me that you never type over a name in the name field.

I'm open for ideas!

 

[gemma-the-husky]

improved design generally

1. add another key on some unique field, such as customer name, to prevent duplicates.

2. make some fields mandatory. but in a (otherwise) blank record, which fields ARE being set to non null values?

3. hard to stop really. you can stop it happening accidentally, but hardly deliberately. users need to be able to change stuff if it is wrong.

 

[Steve R.]

You can slow it down by "locking" text boxes (such as last name) for data that is not expected to change. I also change the back color of boxes to identify the ones that can not be edited.

To allow editing, I use a check box that can be clicked to unlock them and to change the background color. Locking is automatically re-activated when moving from one record to the next.

For critical fields, you could use a Pop-Up form to note that the data in a particular text box has been changed and to ask that obvious question "Are you sure?"