Why do you come to Access World? (1 Viewer)

[Jon]

This place seems to be the most popular place on the interweb for Access. But, I have never asked members why they come here. So tell me your story, why is it you come here, be it new members or those who have been here for years? What benefit do you get from coming here regularly, or even sporadically.

 

[Steve R.]

When I was working, I was developing an Access application. Obviously the place to be. Good technical support. Also, compared to some websites, those providing support have been much friendlier and helpful.

Now, I'm principally involved in the "Water Cooler" and "Politics and Current Events" sub-forums. Good reasonable discussions, sometimes affected by what some consider to be "reasonable".

Now that I am retired, one of my goals has been to learn PHP/HTML/CSS/Python which is the sub-forum "Web Design and Development". I haven't made much progress in that regard, but it is a reason to maintain a relationship with the website. Considering the evolution of database design, this sub-forum is underutilized.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I'm here because of the people and because I still have a project underway that involves Access, Excel, and Word. I have created an app that uses some routines I developed some time ago for parsing of text strings. I download GEDCOM files from Ancestry.COM and use Excel via App Objects to build "family tree" diagrams in two different formats - ancestors and descendants. I use Word to make a "family book" listing people and the extended info about them. Just recently I upgraded it to also use TransferSpreadsheet to import a table that I now tweak directly in Excel but then import as a table of valid keywords that I will recognize in GEDCOM files.

I have met Dick7Access from this forum and there a few more I would love to meet. Of course, without naming names, there are also some I would avoid like the plague, but that is true with any large enough group.

 

[vba_php]

parsing of text strings.

speaking of parsing stuff Richard.....have you ever had to parse records from a file of any extension, specifically .txt's or csv's where the delimiter was a line feed or carriage return, and then saw VBA return the wrong results to you? I ran into this annoyance during my last contract and I had to tell the employer it was their vendor's fault because everything I tried resulted in the same anomaly, which was a bunch of rubbish in terms of "incorrectness". Let us try to keep this one a bit short too, because that is not the topic of this thread.

 

[Micron]

Originally I had an issue that could only be solved by a subquery, and a gent named Orange over at AccessForums.net helped me solve a problem for a db I was creating at work. I decided to give back as much as I could there, and I guess after a period of time I was invited here because of it.

There's a lot of diversified talent/knowledge here along with people who are willing to share it. That might not be so obvious for someone who just joins to get their problem solved but I think it soon becomes apparent. What you don't want is for bad apples to spoil the whole barrel because it's the good apples who will stop participating. IMHO it starts with the good apples showing their brown spots - if you get my drift.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The GEDCOM file I have to parse comes back as a .GED file but in reality, it is merely a UTF-8 text file in which the data fields are not predictable in size but they ARE predictable in their order based on appearance of a specific type of marker. There are some marker fields but then the raw data field is so variable in format that I couldn't run it through something like WORD to convert it to a table based on spaces as delimiters. Therefore, I can't easily convert via columnar positioning. Doesn't matter because if I parse out the elements I can always identify them by the order in which they appeared. THAT is predictable.

To get the ball rolling, I have to download the GEDCOM file and manually edit it using Notepad, which has the ability to convert UTF-8 files to ANSI files. I do not need to do any kind of FIND/REPLACE operations, just the file format conversion. Open, SaveAs, Close. Short and sweet - but I don't recall there being a way to do that via Notepad from VBA because I don't recall there being a .DLL for it.

Once the .GED has been converted to ANSI format as a .TXT file, the presence of <CR><LF> at the end of the line doesn't matter because my parser would handle control characters correctly if they appeared. The only thing it wouldn't have handled would be one of the extended characters of the UTF-8 character set. The ordinary characters, even in UTF-8, were no problem for it but unfortunately, once or twice one of the GEDCOM records contained one of those oddball cases. Fortunately, those cases only occur in something I don't need for my tree structuring. I don't use that particular record type for anything - so when I know that record keyword is present, I just discard the whole thing and skip to the next record.

That same parser once helped me out at work. We had to scan certain web server logs, I believe it was for IIS, because we needed to identify the source of some incoming traffic. Again, IIS and other server logs tend to have fixed order but variable element size, so my parser worked quite well to isolate certain elements of the log file to give us IP addresses and usage patterns. (Yes, I know there are products that do that, but this was years ago and the Navy hadn't bought the statistics analyzer - so I had to "roll my own.")

 

[NauticalGent]

...and a gent named Orange...

Sounds like a JACK of all trades...

 

[NauticalGent]

First and foremost, the Water Cooler!

 

[vba_php]

There are some marker fields but then the raw data field is so variable in format that I couldn't run it through something like WORD to convert it to a table based on spaces as delimiters.

most of my use of office products nowadays are for things they weren't even intended for. case in point, my HTML writing spreadsheet code.

 

[MajP]

I post on these forums, for the same reason people do crossword puzzles, soduko, play chess, etc. It is the challenge of solving a puzzle. That is why I gravitate to harder questions. However, I learned every time you try to answer a hard question you learn more. I was knowledgeable when I started on forums and then became an expert of Access by trying to answer questions. There used to be a guy on another Forum with the log in PHV. He could do SQL that would blow my mind. By following his threads I stepped up my game in SQl.

 

[vba_php]

There used to be a guy on another Forum with the log in PHV. He could do SQL that would blow my mind. By following his threads I stepped up my game in SQl.

I remember that guy very well. I wonder where he went....

 

[GinaWhipp]

I had just gotten my first MVP award and was looking for places to answer questions besides the newsgroups. I always felt like, and still do, I get a lot more than I gave back.

 

[AccessBlaster]

I originally came here for technical support while writing small apps for work.

 

[zeroaccess]

Probably the newest member here.

I joined because in my searching for solutions to various issues during the development of my database, this forum tends to come up frequently and has provided some great information.

When I finally decided to join, I didn't even recognize the site. Turns out the forum software had just been changed the day before, and I have to say, I really like it.

I have tried to provide solutions to some questions based on what I have learned so far, as I always give back to the forums I learn from.

 

[vba_php]

I don't think I've answered your original question in this thread yet, Jon. Well everyone now knows who I am from years ago, and even back then I didn't know why I came here. I think it was probably my father got me started with this program back in the 90's and since I hung out on the internet a lot shortly after that, I ended up registering an account here because this program was what I was the best at.

 

[AC/DC]

I joined for help with Access since I couldn't figure it out myself. Now I check in for the Watercooler and other non technical sub-forums. Plus I'm sure I'll need more help in the future.

 

[Galaxiom]

Starting in 2005 I had done a little bit of work with queries in Access connected into a accounting system that had some functionality gaps and needed some fixing when it things got screwed up through misuse. A colleague had introduced me and he knew a lot about queries but he hadn't done really advanced stuff either.

In a different job in 2009 I was assigned a project to build an actual application and I was more or less on my own with just Google. AWF kept coming up with results and I eventually joined to ask specific questions I had not been able to find answers to. I kept coming across other really useful stuff while looking for answers and eventually started scanning over the new posts pretty much daily because I would regularly learn new things.

As my knowledge grew I started answering some easy questions. I got even more feedback from the experienced developers and got into discussions about more advanced stuff and kept going from there.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I originally joined because many years ago I agreed to take over an Access database at our Navy office. It had been put together by another guy and I didn't even know about the project. Suddenly it became important and at the same time that guy (call him Gene) got a job offer in his home town. Of course he jumped at it. So the boss got me involved.

Gene meant well, but OH MY STARS was he ever off-base? Normalization was apparently foreign to him and he was using a SPREADSHEET as his main table. To say it was poorly structured doesn't cut it. Performance was in the toilet. I came to this forum because I found some answers, then more answers. Basically, I learned a lot by doing. Eventually I learned enough that I thought I could answer a couple of questions, so I did. One thing led to another. Gene did me a favor by being a poor designer and trying to retrofit someone else's poorly designed spreadsheet to database usage. You have no idea how much you learn by untangling THAT plateful of spaghetti.

By the time my second big database rolled around, I had become fairly VBA and Access literate. I felt that I could pass along what I learned, because I had the pleasure of having a teacher who long ago instilled in me a certain standard: Knowledge hoarded is knowledge wasted. So I made it a point to pass it forward. BobLarson of this forum nominated me for the MVP in 2008 because I had helped so much. Somewhere in there I also became a VIP member. Now I do what I can to pass along knowledge (and maybe sometimes a little wisdom) to the younger generation.

 

[zeroaccess]

I guess you could say I had a similar experience - I started with the Northwind sample database because it resembled the structure I needed for my use case. I transformed it from the inside out, learning lots along the way. Learning by doing. Learning by chasing down all the references to something after I renamed it, learning by blowing things up and fixing them. And now finding some improved methods to replace existing ones and evolve the project further, some of it from this forum.

Northwind is a great beginner's tool, as long as you have other resources to help - you're going to need them. And those resources should hopefully also hint at the idea that it's a showcase of different ways Access can be used to do things, but not necessarily always the best ways. You'll end up changing almost everything, but starting with a complete, working program is much more of a learning tool than building from a blank screen. A blank screen doesn't show you how it all connects together. It doesn't show you what's possible. That is why I was disinterested and failed Access class 18 years ago. It's a whole different story now.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

I get up every morning and the first thing I do is come to AWF to read contributions from Adam. (vba_php) I can't wait to read his latest deep insights into the functionality of MS Access, and the wonderful way he interacts with people, he is a pinnacle of perfection, something I aspire to..