Ensuring uniform control width – Free utility

I swear that Access is still living in 1995. If you could honestly re-read this post without laughing that would be incredible. So we need a utility to resize controls because of a bug and this news makes the Access Blog homepage? You guys need to seriously think about whether there will be any Access developers when you finally release 14. In case you haven't noticed - in the time since 2007 - Google Docs has appeared and made thousands of microreleases, Amazon has brought businesses into the cloud, and Apple has made real mobile communication a reality. And you're talking about resizing controls? It's a total affront to people who have spent years developing Access databases. I cannot imagine how you have watched all this (and systems like Caspio and Ironspeed) and not understood the situation. Scary, really, but then almost everything MS does these days is sub-standard, unnecessary and/or buggy.

I been using access for more then 10 years and NEVER had that problem and never Had to worry about this issue one bit. Have you downloaded Tony’s utility and used it? Please give some inputs on what you think about it? After all, it is free and is something being given to this community. I am 100% behind you if you have something to contribute here also. I’ve never had the need for Tony’s utility and frankly I’m not even aware of the problem after 10+ years of writing applications. However, if you have some ideas or improvements for Tony’s utility, then lets hear them. If you really asking about control layouts, then why not take some time to learn about the new features and how to use access to prevent the above problems? The layout problems Tony speaks of is really an issue of how users place and size controls on a screen. Access 2007 has a new feature called control layouts in which the position and inserting and deleting and resizing and controls is automatically handled for you. This is an absolute brilliant and stunning change in the graphical interface. It also improves the ability of users to build and design forms and reports in an unbelievably amazing way. So, when in a report, if I delete a column in the detail section, the label In the heading section is also deleted and then the rest of the controls move over to fill that hole. And, the SAME occurs when you re-size controls. Here’s a video of this type of system in action when building a report:

office.microsoft.com/.../HA102374121033.aspx The above control layouts ALSO works for forms! I’m not suggesting that you don’t criticize things here. When those complaints are based on your lack of understanding of the problem at hand and that you now have control layouts, then I just view your complaints more as a rant then that of constructive comments that I would expect from a serious developer in our industry. Albert D. Kallal

Edmonton, Alberta Canada

kthe allal@msn.com

Hello Minton McKarkquey,

I had a look at Caspio as you suggested. The following post convinced me, for the time being, to keep my fingers crossed for Access 14 and not to loose hope with Access: blog.thescoop.org/.../six-reasons-to-look-past-caspio To add to the six points given in the link above, even if these online applications would have been cheep, I understand that their user interface is still way behind compared to a rich interface, and their response time is so much slower. I tried one of their example sites. A simple filter used on only 10 records took so much time, that I would be annoyed using such an application. I too have my criticisms that I try to express here, but if you want to be convincing in your criticism you must be more specific. Show an example of a better platform, and show how it is superior to Access. If you are so unbalanced and swayed you are not convincing, at least not to me. Gilad