Quicker Navigation of Records

[kannon]

Hello. This probably is not one of the more earth shuttering questions.

I use the Record Buttons for scrolling thru records on a form.

Before when using Access 2003 I could hold the left or right button and the records would scroll by quickly.

With Access 2007 now I have to click each time to more a record. Did Access 2007 change this feature or did I mistakenly change a setting when I converted from 2003 to 2007??

Much appreciated. With 400+ records it can be time consuming.

Kannon

 

[Banana]

That question has been asked and the answer has been that the feature was changed in 2007. Therefore, you would have to roll out your own implementation to get that functionality backing.

However, the browsing shouldn't really span much more than ten, maybe fifty at most. Why not use a search form at the top of the form for the users to select a user- using a combobox will enable you to quickly select the record with autocomplete.

 

[missinglinq]

"The feature was changed" is Banana being polite! It is, in fact, a bug in 2007 that has not been addressed by Microsoft as of yet.

Stephen Lebans has a custom navigation button hack that emulates the standard nav buttons.

http://www.lebans.com/recnavbuttons.htm

If I remember correctly, his navigation buttons are actually on a subform that you add at the bottom portion of your form. Perhaps you can use it.

 

[boblarson]

"The feature was changed" is Banana being polite! It is, in fact, a bug in 2007 that has not been addressed by Microsoft as of yet.

Um, no Banana is correct. It was changed ON PURPOSE by the Access Team (they have specifically told us MVP's that).

 

[missinglinq]

As Christine Lavin would say "What were they thinking?" Did they bother to tell the MVPs why?

 

[boblarson]

As Christine Lavin would say "What were they thinking?" Did they bother to tell the MVPs why?

If I remember correctly, it had to do with the problems caused by scrolling too fast through records. But, since it was quite a while ago, I'm not completely sure of the whole thing. I just do remember that they had said it was done on purpose. Perhaps Banana remembers better than I do. I seem to have a harder time remembering things lately (hope that isn't a bad omen).

 

[boblarson]

Okay, I have to correct myself here (my memory does seem to be getting particulary bad). It really isn't a "bug" but it isn't able to be updated based on what was used for the navigation buttons. It isn't that they CHOSE to do it this way but they overlooked bringing that feature in.

I found this from a response from Clint Covington in the Access Team Blog:

I can give you the story about auto repeat. Shortly after beta 1 shipped I wrote a spec to update the visuals of a number of aspects of the UI to be more modern and look more consistent with the new status bar, ribbon, navigation pane, etc. The navigation bar use to have a heavy 3-d look that stood out like a sore thumb. A developer on the team ended up re-writing the control with some new technology components (the original control was built on some very old internal technology that din't support the new visuals). As part of updating the visuals we missed the auto-repeat feature.

You posted about it in this forum a while back and I went and talked to development about bring back the feature. The code was written in a way that he couldn't use the old logic to do the auto-repeat functionlity. They looked at it and determined end user benefit didn't out-weight the risk of taking a largish new code change, test the code, fix bugs new bugs, etc. I had a hard time arguing that the feature was widely used by current customers.

The Blog post is at
http://blogs.msdn.com/access/archive/2006/12/04/improvements-to-assistance-features-and-content.aspx

 

[Banana]

Yeah, that was what I was thinking about when I made that remark- just couldn't remember where I saw that remark. Thanks for digging up that link, Bob.

Can't say I agree with the changes and if my memory serves, it still hasn't changed for Access 2010. :\ I think they underestimated the benefit of "auto-repeating" feature, even though there are other issues (e.g. you really don't want to browse through hundreds of record and potentially bog down the database server with several one-row requests.) that would have to be addressed somehow.

 

[missinglinq]

No, but you might want to go to the Js, for example, and then scroll to find a client who might be Joe Johnson or might be Joe Johnston! Or maybe scroll thru patients in a given Zip Code.

The problem, I suspect, is that Microsoft programmers haven't actually worked, day to day, using databases as a work tool! It's not a problem confined to them, of course. We see posters every day who want to use "Save" buttons, contrary to the way Access is intended to work, and contrary to the way experienced Access data-entry people expect it to work, because they've never actually entered data in an Access database.