Going from Basics to super fancy :)

[Indep99]

Hi guys,
I just created my first database with a lot of help from this forum and google, and I am pretty happy with it... now I would like to add something that will make it very useful for the audience... (let me know if i'm just being crazy and I'll give up on the idea) but here it goes

We have a set of dates that a project needs to meet and the audience needs to see the if it's on time or being delayed... for example 3 weeks before the target date, it needs to be at office X...
What I would like to create is a status bar with the dates showing and then based on what the user enters (in another input form) for the project, the report generated will show where it is at and if it's passed Office X date and it is still not there, then office x will show an X and the file will show as late

Something similar to microsoft project timeline...

Anyway any guidance will be great... Thanks!

 

[Galaxiom]

You could use a textbox. Change the number characters and format as appropriate to the logic you use to calculate the completedness of the project.

You would need rich text formatting to allow the colour to be changed for each character.

 

[Indep99]

sorry, I don't follow

 

[The_Doc_Man]

A few words of advice.

1. Before you start doing this, CAREFULLY DEFINE what you want to do. Access won't do anything if you can't tell it what you want.

2. Think small. Overdoing this sort of thing can become a real project. Doing too much at once only makes it worse, not better.

3. Decide some key factors such as whether you want one timeline or many timelines on the same form, how flexible should the form be regarding what you want to display and how you want to view what you have. I.e. long time scale, short time scale, sliding time scale, always pick incomplete items, pick items from a multi-select list box, etc.

Once you do this, the lines themselves aren't that difficult. Lines have properties you can manipulate such as .LEFT, .WIDTH, .BORDERCOLOR (I think line color is this property), and the line height (which is NOT the .HEIGHT property). Draw a line on a form, call up the property sheet, and look it up on the Format panel.

Once you have the idea, create lines that start and end where you want them on a grid. Just be careful to check the start and end points for being on the grid in the scale you have chosen, and truncate the items before you try to display them.

How easy or how complex this gets is strictly up to you. Good luck. And take the time to design BEFORE you build. Your goals ARE reachable but only if you lay out a good road map first.