Don’t be afraid to refactor something if it’s getting too complicated.

One of my customers often will have new ideas for reports or forms in the Access app that would really help him make his business better and his life easier. Many times these ideas will bend and stretch the limits of the original way I had chosen to do it.

For example, I have a report that started as a snapshot of data in time. Then we added history and a record comparison showing the differences from the latest snapshot run on a schedule to the current point in time.

Since then I’ve added weekly deltas of recorded hours (all really as snapshots in time). So what happens when you change the schedule? His assumptions were for it to continue just tracking week to week, but now, some of the data isn’t entered yet and some is which throws everything off.

At this point, it’s time to re-think what he really wants. He’s treating the snapshots as though they represent a concrete weekly range of data which is sometimes true, but not when you do multiple runs in the middle of the week. Then it is recording differences between the previous snapshot and the new snapshot as it was originally intended to do by me, but now doesn’t make sense to him.

So now, I’ll be regenerating the report as deltas of data during certain date ranges. I do not see my job here being done any time soon! Long live Access! Even with the advent of AI, I do not see a point at which the customer will be able to use AI to get exactly what he wants without being able to articulate it very well. The targets will keep changing. As long as I can stay more trustworthy than AI, I should be good.