Access Fields bound to a function – updating once or per record

by Jonathan Halder | Jan 10, 2025 | Blogging, MS Access, MS Access Forms, MS Access Queries, MS Access Reports, MS Access VBA Coding

Another gotcha in Access is when you use a function of any kind as a query field or as a bound field on a form or report. This can also be done in Conditional Formatting fields in forms and reports. Let’s say you bind a continuous form field to the builtin...

How to programmatically tell the difference between changing a combo box by typing or by choosing from the dropdown

by Jonathan Halder | Jan 9, 2025 | Blogging, MS Access, MS Access Forms, MS Access VBA Coding

I had written some code for a client using the onChange and onKeyPress events of a ComboBox to be able to determine when the user had simply typed some text in, or whether they had selected an item from the dropdown list using the dropdown event. This was because the...

Forms that can’t write to records – Access and it’s usually helpful Lookup_ prefix

by Jonathan Halder | Jan 8, 2025 | Blogging, MS Access, MS Access Forms, MS Access Queries, MS Access Tables, MS Access VBA Coding

Today I had a weird problem that took me about 2 hours to track down. I had a normal form in Continuous view that was not triggering an error of any kind, but would not write to the record. It could see all the records, you could navigate to them, and I had a delete...

Do you use “Set”? Make sure you destroy it when you’re done!

by Jonathan Halder | Jan 7, 2025 | Blogging, MS Access, MS Access Forms, MS Access Reports, MS Access VBA Coding

Ok, so in some cases, VBA is nice to you and destroys variable references you use when you utilize the SET keyword. Let’s say you do something like this: Dim dbObj As DAO.Database Set dbObj = CurrentDb This is in the context of some kind of function or sub, or...

Access JumpStart – Form Resizing class

by Jonathan Halder | Dec 26, 2024 | Blogging, MS Access, MS Access Forms, MS Access VBA Coding

One of the features of our Access JumpStart application template is a form resizing class: This VBA class, HAL_FormResizeCls, is designed to handle the resizing of forms and their controls in Microsoft Access. Here’s a summary of its functionality and how...

Figuring out when to do TDD vs simple form design

by Jonathan Halder | Dec 20, 2024 | MS Access, MS Access Forms, MS Access Tables, MS Access VBA Coding, TDD

I’ve been sick for the past two days, and kept getting too tired to create a post for the day. So I did what I could for my clients first, then slept. 😛 I’m feeling much better today, so I’m back in the messaging chair. I ended up scrapping my idea...