I was working on a database in Access yesterday and wound up fishing through the help file looking for a clue. I never did find what I was looking for but I did come across this:

For additional information, select the item in question and press F1 (in Windows) or HELP (on the Macintosh).

Okay, first off, Microsoft never made Access for the Mac. Apparently there is something about the engine that is built in to Windows and isn’t present in Mac OS X. Fair enough and I have not heard a big outcry from the Mac users out there. Secondly, there isn’t and as far as I know never was a HELP key on the Mac keyboard. Wonder how this got in there.

Engage Geek Mode.

What I was trying to do was dynamically address controls on a form in VisualBasic. The name of the controls is in a table and I needed to get to each one to make some changes.

If ControlName is a variable with the name of the control in it, ThisForm is the name of the form, and you want to change the caption, the syntax looks like this:

(“Forms”)(“ThisForm”)(ControlName)(“Caption”) = “Caption Changed”

Place that in a While loop and walk through that table one record at a time and you’re dynamically addressing controls! Unfortunately, if you search the help file for this you won’t find it. I had to pull out a database I’d written in the Air Force to figure out how to do this. Not that the help file is a waste, I used it to teach my self how to program Access. It is just that sometimes this kind of advanced programming is hard to locate in the help file.

I’d forgotten how much I missed doing heavy duty programming like this. <:-) (that is a cone head simley)

Disengage Geek Mode.