The enduring nature of Access

[NauticalGent]

Greeting Access Aficionados,

I was having a private conversation with one of our highly respected members. They were involved in a thread and I was impressed with something they had said so I contacted them about it.

I have always been impressed with this member's passion for Access and their ability to harness the power of Access to maximize the full functionality of Access coupled with their equally mastery of VBA.

Their are a few members on the forum who fit that bill, but THIS one had this to say:

...even though you can make lots of things work using different methods, I've come to accept that fighting with Access is fruitless and so I do things the "Access" way unless I have a real need to do it MY way. Think about the brilliance of the original Access development team. This product is still essentially the same after 35+ years. That is absolutely amazing. Stuff has been added over the years. The "look" has been modernized (not enough), but you wouldn't have any trouble today using A2.0 once you got past the issue of finding all the options due to the changes in how the menus are organized.

Now those are the words of someone who loves what they do and it shows...

 

[Dreamweaver]

I remember v2.0 Now I feel so old lol
The only issue I have with access is why did they replace the old toolbars with ones you now have to click 3 or 4 time to get what you want with the old custom toolbars 1 click was all you needed, Other than that still love using it and finding new and wonderful ways to give me brain ache.

 

[Pat Hartman]

why did they replace the old toolbars

I know the answer to that. I don't agree with it but they didn't ask me. Over time with all the options added to various Office products, the menus were getting clunky (or so they thought) so they wanted to "modernize" them and settled on the Ribbon which is XML behind the scenes and in theory easy to expand. I argued with the development team at a meeting in Redmond that Access didn't have to conform to Word and Excel and Outlook since it was not a program used by casual users and we liked the existing menu capability as well as our ability to control it. They disagreed. But what was worse, they never built a menu building tool for us to use. That crop of Access developers (and probably the current ones also) think of Access differently than we do. We look at Access as a development platform and that is why we need the ability to create menus and lock stuff so the user can't get to it. But they look at Access just as they look at Word and Excel. It is a tool to create documents which are very different from applications.

 

[deletedT]

We look at Access as a development platform and that is why we need the ability to create menus and lock stuff so the user can't get to it. But they look at Access just as they look at Word and Excel.

I have a personalized ribbon for each of my applications. As every user logs in to the Front End, the ribbon is re-generated (if I can use generate in this case) according to his/her rights. The tabs, buttons, menus, right click context menu, every thing that you can imagine, every thing that you may think of is personalized according to what the user is allowed to do and what is not.

the following is just an example. You can not find even one of access original ribbon, menus or buttons. Everything is just created according to the user privileges to let him do what he's supposed to.

I think I'm using Access from 1997. And in my opinion, adding ribbon to Access made it much more flexible and user friendly.



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[jdraw]

Tera,

Impressive! Perhaps you'd like to show readers the code for customizing the ribbon for individual user preferences.

 

[deletedT]

Tera,

Impressive! Perhaps you'd like to show readers the code for customizing the ribbon for individual user preferences.

I'll post it if anyone is interested.
But it's not a code. It's a sequence of procedures. ( more than a thousand line of code)

I have a table that list the tabs.
And a child table that has a list of buttons for each tab.
Another table with a relation to both above tables keeps two field for captions of each button (one for english users, one for Japanese) another field for on mouse over hint and one more field that keeps the name of sub/function when the button is clicked.

Both these tables has a relation to a table that keeps the right and privileges of users.

Now in every login, the user types his login name and Pass. A function selects a collection of tabs according to the user privilege , and adds several buttons to each tab and creates a xml for the ribbon. The xml is passed to Access to create the ribbon and I'm done.

Each user has a language specified collection of tabs and buttons to do his job.

Since the number of users are not too much, I'm changing this method to a much simpler one. I mixed the table for tabs and buttons and it's xml into one single table.
In every login show/hide several tabs according to each user right.

For example Admin & Form Design tabs in above images (the two right tabs) are only offered to admin group. Other users don't have these tabs.

 

[jdraw]

I'm sure others could benefit from your materials.
Please post with an example if possible/practical.
Thanks in advance.

 

[deletedT]

From 8/15 Japan goes into a one week summer holidays. The first three days I’ll be on a short trip with my family. I’ll put up a sample database in the last two days to show how does it work.

I’m sorry I can’t post sooner.

 

[NauticalGent]

While we are waiting for Tera’s sample, here is the first in a 9 part series of videos on how to do custom ribbons.

I had toyed with the idea myself but what I have works and quite frankly, I was still too lazy to monkey with it...

https://youtu.be/Zt3F4_Z5LIw

 

[jdraw]

Thanks Tera. Enjoy your vacation.

 

[Dreamweaver]

I've gone back to using buttons as it drives me nuts click, click, click

 

[Pat Hartman]

I never stopped using buttons and tabs on the form. Even after 14 years (I've been using the ACE version of Access since the first beta in late 2005), I am not fond of the ribbon although if I had to pick one change to revert pre-2007, it would be the nav pain (sic). That i dislike very much. The database window was a much more user friendly tool. Adding a search/filter would have been a good enhancement and probably easy to do. The 2007 team thought that we developers would use the nav pane as the navigation tool for our apps rather than the switchboard (which they left in but hid by removing it from the ribbon) but there are way too many limitations with the custom groups to make those usable as a switchboard.

 

[Dreamweaver]

Allowing Uses into a switchboard is complete madness maybe these people upgrading access should spend a few years building projects.

 

[deletedT]

Allowing Uses into a switchboard is complete madness maybe these people upgrading access should spend a few years building projects.

Can you be a little bit more specific? Why and how?
I'm afraid I can't understand what you're trying to say here.


Thanks.

 

[Gasman]

Allowing Uses into a switchboard is complete madness maybe these people upgrading access should spend a few years building projects.

Mick,
Why do you say that?

I've only ever written simple applications, but have given the users a switchboard to work from when the app starts.

I amended the table and code to take into account various levels of authorisation/roles and has worked fine.

Admittedly I have never had any savvy Access users, who would want to dig deeper though, but then, they only ever used a accde FE.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I think Mick was referring to using the Nav pane as a user switchboard.

 

[Dreamweaver]

Mick,
Why do you say that?

I've only ever written simple applications, but have given the users a switchboard to work from when the app starts.

I amended the table and code to take into account various levels of authorisation/roles and has worked fine.

Admittedly I have never had any savvy Access users, who would want to dig deeper though, but then, they only ever used a accde FE.

I do the same and disable the Navigation pane thats what I meant

 

[Dreamweaver]

I think Mick was referring to using the Nav pane as a user switchboard.

thanks Pat still thinging of the good old days lol

 

[Pat Hartman]

I like shinny new stuff as much as the next person but change for the sake of change makes me nuts and we have way too much of that in the history of Access.

I just noticed something that was good, broken, fixed, and now broken again.

When I make test data I sometimes just duplicate values from previous rows. So the key strokes are down arrow, cntl-quote, down arrow but now we're back to needing two down arrows to advance to the next row. It wasn't broken a few months ago the last time I did this but it is broken again now. Why?? Who asked for this to be changed?? Why change something that isn't broken??

 

[NauticalGent]

Why?? Who asked for this to be changed?? Why change something that isn't broken??

The Access gnomes are some mischievous little cusses...