Selecting products in an orders form without combo boxes

[Cocis91]

I have a pretty standard Orders form which contains an 'order details' subform for selecting products to be ordered. The subform is in datasheet view (like in the Northwind database) and you use a combo box to select a product from a list of available products.

This is fine for if you don't have too many available products on your database, but when you have 50+ then this is not an ideal way of picking a product.

What I would like to do is to create a form that displays the products available (organised by category, with category headers). When you click the product field on the order form, it would bring up this 'product picking' form and there would be a macro that is triggered on the onclick event when you select a product. The macro would fill in the selection in the order details subform.

However, I cannot make a picking form that looks any good. I use Access97 and it would be great if you could create categories by which to order on a form like you can do for reports, but you can't. Does anyone have any ideas on how to do this or else any ideas of an alternative more user-friendly way of selecting products on an order form instead of a combo box? I'm sure this is a common problem.

 

[pcs]

use a query as the source for a continuous subform on a popup form...that will allow you organize the product list in any order you choose.

btw: you can also base a combo box on a query to get the desired order, and use headings...

hth,
al


[This message has been edited by pcs (edited 12-08-2001).]

 

[Pat Hartman]

Northwind.mdb and/or orders.mdb has an example of synchronized comboboxes to pick categories and products.