Rich Text Format, yay or nay? (1 Viewer)

[WYMineShaftGap]

I am rebuilding an old Access utility database, internal to my small company. I want to use Long Text with formatting, namely the "Rich Text" option. Do you folks have opinions on it?
What the Chrome Browser says is negative, as in do not use this feature. OK, but then ... really? it is freaking 2026 and user text data must look like a data refugee from 1980?

 

[RonPaii]

I have add RTF to some forms, but the Access version of it is VERY limited.

 

[CJ_London]

It's certainly not Word, but it's fine for the basic formatting requirements. It would be nice if you could include images and tables, all depends on what you want to do. Alternative is to create in html and use the new edge web control which can be used on continuous forms - but really only for display - it is not a text editor - you would need to create that yourself.

To see the formatting code, view the richtext value in a plaintext textbox. You can edit it if you want - for example to choose a different highlight colour from the limited range available. Or in use, use the replace function to change a colour/font size etc.

 

[CJ_London]

Just thought I'd ask ChatGPT to create a html editor and this is what it came up with.

needs a bit of work - for example, store the image, set backgrounds and the like. But has the basic functionality

To install, unzip and modify the edge control controlsource to point to wherever you put the html file

 

[RonPaii]

If you are converting existing text and memo fields to RTF, you will need to update the data. Replace line feeds with "<BR>".

Replace$(OldText, Chr$(10), "<BR>")
or
Replace$(OldText, vbCrLf, "<BR>")

 

[cheekybuddha]

Replace$(OldText, Chr$(10), "<BR>")

What about the vbCr here? (Chr(13))

 

[GPGeorge]

To address the original question about whether it's worthwhile or not, I would say it depends to some extent on why you would implement it.

As noted in previous posts, Rich Text in Access is a subset of html. If you need to bold or italicize words or phrases in a string of text, or maybe add color to a word, it's perfectly adequate. If you are thinking about anything more ambitious, it's probably more work than it would be worth.

For an example of Rich Text, look at the product catalog in the Northwind Developers Edition template.

 

[tvanstiphout]

Rich Text is fine for Comment-like fields where people can type away and use some formatting tools.

It is NOT fine for creating a textbox where additional text must be inserted at the caret. In my case it was a physician's patient narrative, with ability to insert standard phrases. RTF is NOT suitable for that.

 

[MarkK]

Do you folks have opinions on it?

I find it useful in two cases...
• To pretty up labels. I use a TextBox set to RichText, and drive data into a formatted html template.
• To give users control over formatting in the body of reports they produce. I supply an editable rich TextBox, and combine their rich formatted text as the body of a report with fixed and predictable headers.

 

[Ken Sheridan]

One context in which they are useful is in referencing academic sources. The following is an example of Harvard citation format, which is commonly used in the UK:

Thagard, P. (1990) ‘Philosophy and machine learning’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 20(2), pp. 261–276.

 

[isladogs]

When rich text was first made available with (from memory) A2003, it was buggy and got a bad reputation at that time.
The early issues were fixed long ago and it is both usable and very stable.

RTF is indeed a subset of HTML but it has all the text formatting features you are likely to want in Access.

If used appropriately, RTF is a very useful feature.
My Rich Text Editor is available if its any use to you:

Rich Text Editor

This article demonstrates the use of rich text in a long text (memo) field and shows how to view the underlying code. It also compares the use of rich text and true HTML in Access forms

isladogs.co.uk

However RTF cannot handle images or videos.
For that you need a full HTML editor to create the .html pages for display in a browser control in Access.

Well over 15 years ago, I created my own HTML editor to develop a full help system for one of my commercial apps with around 400 items in both RTF and HTML formats. The screenshot below is from that HTML editor:

 

[Mark_]

I am rebuilding an old Access utility database, internal to my small company. I want to use Long Text with formatting, namely the "Rich Text" option. Do you folks have opinions on it?

In your application, will adding RTF be an enhancement that users will use?

If your USERS want to have it, then go for it! If not, sounds like work that won't be put in practice.