Help! Client's request beyond my Access capability

[Eric Girouard]

Hi

A web design client of mine has been developing an Access database with
me for the last few months. His intention was to clean up a very messy
paper-based workflow consisting of many location / many event calendars.

We cleaned up the data, made tables and normalized it. So far so good,
the database part works fine. He can find the information he wants when
his boss needs him to.

Now he wants to produce an 11x17 printed calendar to hand out to his
team so as to not disrupt their established workflow (he's a new
director in an old place). Someone picks these up regularly and inputs
the new data into Access.

My problem is I'm not too sure which way to best implement that. The
calendar control that comes with Access doesn't provide much
functionality (at least apparent to me) other than linking and shading a
particular date in the on-screen calendar.

I would need to see, for example, the "Event code" (primary key), the
"trainer name", "city" and "number of participants" fields on each
square. There could be multiple events per date, so managing the display
within the date squares is an issue.

I had initially thought of capturing an image of the calendar control,
using it as a background image, and placing addressable fields on top of
that. I assume that would mean learning some VB scripting.

Issue is that I am not a programmer, so I thought I'd check here first
to see if anyone can point out the path of least resistance.

TIA

Eric

[jimfortune]

Eric Girouard wrote:

Hi

A web design client of mine has been developing an Access database with
me for the last few months. His intention was to clean up a very messy
paper-based workflow consisting of many location / many event calendars.

We cleaned up the data, made tables and normalized it. So far so good,
the database part works fine. He can find the information he wants when
his boss needs him to.

Now he wants to produce an 11x17 printed calendar to hand out to his
team so as to not disrupt their established workflow (he's a new
director in an old place). Someone picks these up regularly and inputs
the new data into Access.

My problem is I'm not too sure which way to best implement that. The
calendar control that comes with Access doesn't provide much
functionality (at least apparent to me) other than linking and shading a
particular date in the on-screen calendar.

I would need to see, for example, the "Event code" (primary key), the
"trainer name", "city" and "number of participants" fields on each
square. There could be multiple events per date, so managing the display
within the date squares is an issue.

I had initially thought of capturing an image of the calendar control,
using it as a background image, and placing addressable fields on top of
that. I assume that would mean learning some VB scripting.

Issue is that I am not a programmer, so I thought I'd check here first
to see if anyone can point out the path of least resistance.

TIA

Eric

See:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp....176f58cab46186

for a possible starting point. You can use a scale of about 1.3 along
with Adobe Reader's auto-rotate and center print option to get
approximately 11 x 17 or tweak some of the constants in
modDrawingFunct ions to get the exact size you want. Note that tweaking
constants will require changing the maximum number of characters per
line for a given day and changing the shrink to fit code slightly to
handle situations where the maximum is exceeded. Post back here with a
way for me to determine your email address if you need advice on how to
set up multiple columns within a given day. The original version on my
hard drive also has a logo at the top slightly to the right of center
to allow for page holes or a thumb tack that was not included due to
the zlib compression I use to keep the file size low. Reading the
image data fresh each time also adds several seconds to the time it
takes to create the pdf file so I generally use a pre-extracted and
compressed version of the logo saved to a network location.

James A. Fortune