Thursday, April 10, 2014

Access Macro Designer Needs AutoComplete

Those who work with Microsoft Access frequently know that it has a somewhat special macro system compared to the other Office applications. The default is a visual designer, allowing the user to insert control flow structures and some other common programming-ish tasks. Something common when creating advanced databases is the display of message boxes, such as confirmation dialogs.

The visual macro designer makes this incredibly difficult. By not having VBA-like autocomplete, it makes the message box property constants essentially inaccessible. (In fact, I'm not even sure if it accepts the textual constants.) To create a confirmation dialog, the macro writer must enter the numeric constants - which, in addition to being almost impossible to remember, need to be mentally binary-OR'd together to combine attributes (like having Y/N buttons and an exclamation icon).

That renders the macro designer considerably less useful. Please, if you require numbers to be passed as arguments and don't want to use a bunch of Boolean arguments instead, give some autocomplete functionality or at least provide a way to use mnemonics.

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