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I am not going to pretend to know anything about creating forms in Access, it is an entirely new concept to me. I have a DB in access that contains a number of tables and queries. I would like to create an access form that I can use as a search form, to look up any particular fields i need. I would simply type in what I was looking for and a list of the tables/queries that relate to it would appear. Is this doable?
The short answer to your question "is this doable" is: yes this is absolutely doable.
A good place to start would be to use the Form Wizard. Then get some training (plenty online) on how to design forms. Dlookup will likely be your friend.
Alternatively, a Report is another way to show a specific record based on some specified criteria (show me address for person A).
Short answer: Yes.
Longer Answer: I dont know what your background is. If this is your first Database project then you have a lot of reading to do and I would go and get myself a good ACCESS book and read it or spend a lot of time on the Microsoft Technet. Thats about as specific as I can get from the question itself.
Perhaps a solution for you:
Step A: Create a form
There are many ways to create forms. You may try this one:
1) In the Access Objects Window (far left on your screen) mark the table or query you want your form be based on. That means: the form shall display all the fields that are in that specific table or query.
2) With your table or query marked, in the "Create" pane of the Ribbon, click the button "Form". This creates a rudimentary form with all the fields from your table or query arranged in a more or less sensible way. (If you do not like the way the fields are arranged, you can re-arrange them, resize them or remove some of them, etc.)
3) Close this form. On closing, you will be asked to enter a name for it so that you can identify it later.
Step B: Use the form for filtering
1) Open that form (now in "form" view, not "design" view, of course)
2) In Home section of the Ribbon, in the Sort&Filter Area, click on the tiny button "Advanced", and from the dropdown select "Filter by form". Having this done, you then can enter various criteria in the fields on your form. Some of them may display dropdowns to choose from existing content. In some fields you may want to enter stuff like
Like "*liv*"
which will search for content containing any of live, lively, oblivious, olive, etc.
3) To apply the filtering, in the Ribbon, Home Section, Sort&Filter Area, click "Toggle filter". This will make your form display only records that comply with your criteria.
4) To wipe out your filter criteria, use the button Advanced --> Clear all filters.
This was a very basic introduction into core functionality of Access. Generally, I would support the other contributors here in saying: go to your local library and take any of the various Access introductory books they have there, read it, and try out what you read. You will make quick progress. (You may as well read any tutorial in the internet, but I personally would recommend a book: you just will have the fun to stroll through the pages, perhaps sitting in your garden, and bump into interesting stuff you probably would not have expected. That will help your progress considerably.)
Related
How can I achieve editing a custom object record by listing all the records and selecting a particular record in checkbox which will open popup window for editing purpose in visualforce ?
What have you tried already, do you have any code sample you're stuck with?
Be careful what you wish for, "all records" when it's tens of thousands of them will likely blow the page's viewstate. I mean solution might be as simple as making a page with <apex:enhancedList> in it...
Read up about StandardSetController.
It's old feature, it's battle-tested, there will be tons of examples how to use it like https://developer.secure.force.com/cookbook/recipe/editing-multiple-records-using-a-visualforce-list-controller or http://www.sfdcpoint.com/salesforce/pagination-using-standard-set-controller-salesforce/
Looks like you need something very simple that just displays list of links & these links will have JavaScript (window.open function?) that creates a popup with record id passed.
Context:
I teach at a university with mostly monolingual, English-speaking teachers, and students with mostly Russian and Kazakh names.
I want to create a simple form (like this https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1zo0vSfrH-xIosENy1wVjOd_VvPL5LL6UX6g4VqIPFn0/viewform ) that would keep track of reports of plagiarism on a Google Sheet (like this https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h2nAvCq31xumi4SvjMvWWp8RR7ppJ_NtLCiuvrLqVkc/edit?usp=sharing )
Having the English speaking teachers type in Russian and Kazakh names would likely lead to mistakes. There are too many students at the university to choose them from a drop-down menu, and would be too many teachers and courses to create separate Google Forms for all of them, or to use Google's branching page choices (it would require creating hundreds of pages). So I would like instructors to be able to type in the Student ID # and their own Instructor ID #, and then have some way to verify that they have typed that information in correctly (so we don't have the wrong students being penalized, or penalties that don't get assigned to any student at all).
Questions:
1. Is there any possible way (via scripting, an add-on, etc.) to have Google Forms take the Student ID from Page 1, then look up the student's name on the Student Info tab of the Google Sheet and insert it into the text field on the second page of the Google form, so the instructor can verify it's the correct student? (Or any other technique anyone can think of that would allow a Google Form user to verify that they had entered the correct data, or help manage the massive number of choices of students in a university of several thousand students.)
If (as I'm afraid), there is no way to do it with Google Forms, can anyone suggest a Form creation platform that would do something like this, and that would integrate with Google Sheets or something similar?
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
If you are open to doing it differently I'd go this route...
1) Use a short answer box and allow edits to answers.
2) Put the onSubmit() trigger into the sheet. When a submission comes in, send a follow up email to the person with the ID that they typed and the student name that it corresponds to. Let them know that no action is required if that is correct. If it isn't correct, they should edit their response with the edit response link which you can get using getEditResponseUrl(). I'd call it done right here and only worry about additional features if they are needed. It isn't as ideal as verifying at the time but would get the same thing done for people that can't keep their IDs straight. :-)
3) But... if you have people that keep messing up and they don't fix their issues or whatever, add a link in the email to confirm that the entry is accurate. If it isn't then a weekly/daily task runs that deletes any entries that haven't been confirmed and are older than Y days.
4) Alternately, instead of verifying what they type, give them drop down lists made up of a combination of student ID and name. I'd have multiple lists, depending on the number of active students. One or many though, make a script in the sheet that updates the dropdowns in the form either on edit or by manually running the script, either from a menu item or by attaching it to an icon on the page where the IDs/names are at. They should see 12345 - Joe Smith as the option and can find the right one if that student name doesn't match the ID they thought they should use.
I have a script like #4 that I use to populate a form with updated products whenever the list changes. I tied it to a big red button JPG to help the end users remember to run it when they change something, as a menu option didn't work and running every time there was an edit was too much.
If you list of students/IDs also includes the teachers/classes/etc you could even do custom forms for each staff member that uses the form that only populates their students. Not sure how many staff you have so that might not be practical. Though again, once you have the script and the data is accurate, updates are a single click.
I have built a table in Access that is populated by the end user with a form. Next, I would like the end user to retrieve a record and be able to edit the fields in form view.
I see stackoverflow user Hoops asked a similar question, excerpt:
"What I want to do is have the user select a record from the combo
box, which then populates the textboxes (I've already managed to do
this)."
His "already managed to do this" is what I need to know.
I tried using a combo box, but it did not populate the text boxes, and when I selected multiple columns to be displayed, the fields could not be edited.
I tried using a parameter query to retrieve a search record, but I could not get results to display in the form.
While I know I am supposed to ask specific answerable questions, what I really need to know is the method or strategy I should be using to retrieve a record and be able to edit the fields in form view. If I know the best method, I can usually figure out the tactical.
Thanks for any ideas.
Melissa
I suggest a split view form in Access. More info can be found here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/create-a-split-form-HA010075994.aspx
my company's software product has a feature that allows users to generate forms from Word templates. The program auto fills some fields from the SQL database and the user can fill in other data that they desire. So we have a .dotx template that holds the design of the form, and then the user gets the .docx file to fill out when they call it from our program.
The problem we're having is that some of our users have been finding that the forms take an exceptionally long time to open up and then, once open, are so slow to respond (scroll around, etc) that they're unusable. So in my investigations so far, I've found out that the problem systems are one with lower powered CPUs (unfortunately it happens for systems above our system requirements) and the Word forms that cause the problems are ones with large amount of ActiveX style checkboxes on them. I verified that reducing the ActiveX checkboxes fixes the form loading problems.
So I have the following questions about solutions (we're using Word 2007):
1) Is there any way to configure Word, or some other settings, so that there won't be such a strain opening a Word form with lots of ActiveX checkboxes? Any way of speeding up Word's opening?
2) Using Legacy style checkboxes instead of the ActiveX ones makes the forms load fine, but it looks like the user has to double-click the checkbox and change Default Value->Checked. Is there a way to configure it so that they can simply click on the checkbox to tick it? "Legacy Forms" checkbox as a name kind of worries me (Legacy…), does that mean a future version of word at some point wouldn't load the checkboxes because they're "legacy"?
3) Yes, it became clear to me after a little bit of research into solutions that Word is not the tool for the job for forms like I'm describing. InfoPath seems to be exactly what we should have been using all along but unfortunately I wasn't involved in the decision making or development of these forms, just tasked with coming up with a solution.
I'd appreciate answers to any of these, or if anyone has any other ideas for solutions to this problem.
Thanks
I'm about 3 years too late, but if you want a legacy checkbox to act like a checkbox, you have to restrict editing on the document or section. (You can lock just a section, if you want.) Locking--on Word 2010 it's called "Restrict editing"--is an option under either the Developer tab or the Review tab.
If you restrict editing in this way, the user cannot edit the text but can fill in the form field, so if the form field is a checkbox, the user can click the checkbox on or off; if the form field is a text box, the user can fill the text box.
If you choose to lock off just a section, you'll probably want to use continuous section breaks (Page Layout > Breaks > Continuous) and specify which section. (In the space where you choose form editing as your kind of restriction, there's a small link that lets you specify which section or sections are locked.)
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I see them all the time and always ignore them. Can someone explain to me why they have become so prevalent? If I'm using a site that allows me to explore it via tags (e.g., this one, del.icio.us, etc.) that's what I will do. Why would I need a "cloud" of tags upon which to click? I can just type that tag(s) into a search box. What am I missing?
It's more of a browse assist than a search assist. If you see a large or bold tag in a tag cloud that interests you it my lead to some knowledge discovery that wouldn't have otherwise been sought out with a deliberate search. When I am browsing del.ico.us or stackoverflow I appreciate the tags as they sometimes lead me to discover related topics.
Wikipedia has an interesting definition:
A tag cloud or word cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. 1 Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.
It's a easy mechanism to determine which tags are most popular or how dense that tag is populated ( amount of tags).
It's just a intuative interface, I'm fairly certain that's one of the bigger reason's why they are so popular, that and they are very Web 2.0 also.
Why would I need a "cloud" of tags upon which to click? I can just type that tag(s) into a search box. What am I missing?
How do you know what tags are available to type without a lot of trial and error? Even if you know what tags are available, how do you know which are most popular without a bunch more trial and error?
The thing that makes a tag cloud really useful (at least a well implemented tag cloud IMO) is the ability to drill into a topic deeper and deeper.
For example, I could click "Topic A" and then I can see the items in the tag cloud for all tags within the "Topic A" items. I can then drill into one of those sub topic and narrow the items even further.
The stackoverflow tag cloud doesn't do this (which is too bad), but if it did, I could click something like "visualstudio" to drill into the threads tagged visualstudio then click "asp.net" to drill into that, then "javascript". The end result would be a list of all items tagged all three "visualstudio", "asp.net" and "javascript". This is where a tag cloud becomes really useful. Unfortunately, not all tag clouds work this way (but IMO they should).
Because searching for php is not the same as viewing all posts that the owner has tagged as php. Try it.
It helps you understand the focus of the page or site that you're looking at. What topics being discussed the most? What kinds of information will I find here?
If you search for something related to Java and land on two sites, one with a tag cloud showing 'Java' is prominent, and one where Java is almost invisible but 'C#' is prominent it's pretty easy to quickly decide which site is most valuable to you.
Tags give a way of explicitly labelling something with what it is about instead of relying on computers to extract this information.
For example, you might be interested in on questions about stackoverflow. If you search for "stackoverflow" you will get all kinds of questions that are not about stackoverflow at all (e.g. they only contain the word "stackoverflow" because there is some link to another question). By selecting questions that are tagged with "stackoverflow" you get only those post that people have explicitly identified as being about stackoverflow.