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Edited by bobdog on 26-Oct-01 19:14.

This is one of a number of differences between IE and Netscape.

I just had the same problem this week, and it drove me crazy. You won’t find it in Help or anywhere else I’m aware of — I had to dig it out by comparing the HTML between a page that worked right and rest that didn’t.

Look at the HTML at the top of the table for the line that reads:

table border=”0″ width=”100%” cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”5″ align=”left”

The align=”left” argument is the source of the problem. In table properties, change the Alignment dropdown back to “Default”. In my case, it displayed correctly in IE, but Netscape displayed a page that was absurdly wide. The problem went away when I returned to Default Alignment.

What causes it? Who cares. It’s just different. Hover Buttons are another “difference”.

Hope this helps.

Later: I may have misread your question. I guess it gets down to comparing a well-behaved page with a rogue page.

Did you import your copy from a word processor or type it in? Another issue I had recently was pasting in some copy from a Word Perfect document and ended up with a whole bunch of wierd little tags and strange behavior. Best suggestion I can make if this is the case is to strip out all the formatting and re-mark it.

I’m wrestling with the same problem. Take a look at the html for the page. Look for:

The codebase argument may be pointing to your temp directory. FP is supposed to resolve these references, but it doesn’t do it reliably in FP2K.

Also, the line that reads: will sometimes get screwed up. and say something goofy like value=”file://http://C:/my documents/…/index.htm” (yeah, I know file://http:// is an error) with a full path in it. I used a globals search and replace to pull out all the path junk.

I have no idea what causes this, but it’s burned me twice this week. When I exit FP, it still shows in Task Manager as a running app, which it shouldn’t. I’m about to detect and repair to see if that fixes it. It seems to have something to do with whether the page referred to has been saved or not, but that’s just an unconfirmed suspicion at this point.

Is there any possiblity that my Norton Antivirus (2001) could be involved in this?

Blasted hover buttons…I’ve got a client watching every update I make, and it’s getting embarrassing…

Bob Dog

I don’t know if this is still a current thread or not, but I’ll take a whack at it.

1. Look into “splitting” your database. Charlotte mentioned it in passing, but it’s probably the single best step you can take. Each user should have the “front end” on their workstations. Only the “back end” and your ppt presentation should be on the server.

2. Is a browser control necessary? You should be able to launch your browser from a “lightweight” form that has just a hyperlink to the top page of your presentation. I think “lightweight” forms were new in 2000, but you might look into them. I see you’re stuck using ’97, so this one may not help, but it’s been a while since I worked with that version, so I might be wrong.

3. The main problem you’ll have with this setup is to force users to update their “front end” software when a new version is available. Do this in your Autoexec proc by storing a version number or version date in a one-record table in the backend, and a similar piece of data in your front-end, and then compare the two at startup. If the two versions don’t agree, pop up a modal form alerting the user that there’s a new version available and how to get it, and then use an OK button to close Access so they can’t ignore you. There’s a “clever” way to do this update dynamically, but this simpler approach has worked fine for me in the past.

4. Are you linking or embedding graphics in your app? Embedded graphics bloat your file and slow down startup. It’s better to link them, especially if they’re used more than once, and use a graphics program to make the files as small as possible.

Bottom line, store only what must be shared on the server, nothing more. Access ain’t great on networks.

This is an old thread, so I don’t know if I’m wasting my time or not with a response.

FMS has a Rich Text Tool that works well and is sold as a separate product. There is also a rich text control (on which the FMS tool actually acts as a wrapper). Price for the FMS tool is $299, as I recall. The MS rich text tool is either in the Office Developer toolkit or in Visual Studio, as I recall. Functionality is very similar to the features found in WordPad (fonts, colors, hyperlinks, etc.) and includes an optional spell checker.

I haven’t used it with ’97, but have with 2K. If you do use 2K, you must have SR-1 installed (there’s a bug in the MS RichText tool that SR-1 fixes).

With FMS, you can get at both the formatted text and the raw text in code. The raw text looks much better on forms, and the formatted text looks good in reports.

If you’re doing a lot of editing, pay attention to file bloat, which is related to the use of memo fields, not the use of the RT tools.

If you need to protect the content of these stories, you might look into Adobe’s PDF writer, storing the documents in PDF image form that can be emailed, printed, searched, etc. You create these files by “printing” to the PDF writer from Word, which gives you all the editing and formatting features of Word, and you don’t have to worry about file bloat, no matter how many documents you’ve got.

Better to simply kill the startup screen entirely using the /nostartup argument in your Windows shortcut, and then make your own splash screen. The On Timer event works once Access starts.

Told you it wasn’t enough.

I’ve sent a working example and a readme file to Judy by email. Glad to help.

Edited by charlotte on 26-Jul-01 22:30.

Edited to eliminate horizontal scrolling due to wide image

Charlotte, you’re simply amazing. Whatever you’re getting paid, it’s not enough.

At the risk of interjecting another approach to Judy’s question, it sounds like the data she’s tracking is hierarchical and may lend itself to a treeview control as a “finder”. I’ve used this approach for our billing records and it might work here.

If you set up a two panel screen, with the left half containing a treeview control, the tree branches could be the various schools in Judy’s district. Populating the tree would be fast because it’s a short list. The On Click event on a branch can execute a query calling up the students for that particular school, displaying student names in the right panel, again a relatively short list. The On Click event in the student names can then display a traditional form for the student, with the student’s criminal history, er, “incidents” displayed in a subform. Closing the form redisplays the treeview form.

As I recall, I found this approach in the help file for the treeview control (is it Microsoft Windows Common Controls 2?) It’s kinda picky to set up, but it works great for my purposes and I don’t think it would choke the way that a combo box does because you’re nibbling your way to the record you want, pulling only relevant records.

In my app, I also use the progress bar control from the same library to provide invoice totals on the right panel.

I’ll be glad to share the code. You’ve bailed me out a couple of times; I’m happy to return the favor if you folks are interested.

This might be a dead thread, but this may help:

A problem you might run into with split databases is to keep users out of the back end db. You can do this by opening a modal “go away” screen (“This database is restricted and is intended to be…yadda, yadda”) with only one OK button at the bottom that simply closes the db and exits Access.

It won’t stop a coder (holding the shift key on open prevents the form from opening), but it keeps peekers and pokers away from your tables and relationships. If you want to be tricky about it, you can log startups to a table and review it from time to time.

Had this problem with an app I wrote for a small state university. Turned out there were more users that had access to our application than the techies thought. This cured it.

Hope it helps.

One problem you’re likely to run into is that 2K expects to use ADO by default; 97 expects DAO by default. You have to add a reference to DAO if you’re doing any code to speak of.

As I recall, this one bites you as soon as you make a change and recompile, and the error messages you’ll get give you absolutely no clue why the music stopped. An innocuous line of code like “Dim rs as recordset” all of a sudden stops working.

thanks. I’ll give this a try, although I generally set screensaver to none when I set up a machine. I’ll take a look.

Charlotte’s right about limits on combo boxes. It’s a problem that’s been around for a looong time. Basically, you’re fetching back a huge pile of data every time you refresh. And 14 columns just adds to the mess. Back in my Foxpro days, several hundred records was about the most people recommended. 60,000 is over the top and won’t get you a raise.

On ‘tuther hand, couldn’t you do a query and use the query results as your recordsource? Seems like I saw an article to that effect in Advisor in the last few months. I can imagine filling a combo box with say letters of the alphabet or department names (depends on what you’re fetching), and then re-source the combobox on the fly in the after update event, bringing back just the records that fit the query in the “where” clause.

Just a thought.

I must be missing something here.

1. Have you discovered the tab and shift-tab keys yet (to promote and demote)?
2. Have you considered formatting a blank outline, saving it and reusing it (save under another name as soon as you open it)?
3. Try turning off formatting and use Outline view. Use normal view when you’re all done.

There are lots of things to dislike about Word, and outlining is one of them (I dislike the goofy styles they assume you want). But it’s serviceable.

Frankly, I’m so PO’d about Microsoft’s “Buy me and beg for a registration number” policy, I’m thinking Corel is looking better than ever. I may dump Office altogether. But I guess that’s another subject.

Yes they do. My first thought when I read this was the same – why do you want to? Then I remembered getting a stack of 5.25 inchers from a new client that had the source code for his primary business system on them. The local retailer gave me a used drive and I hooked it up (without even bolting it in), got the files I needed, and threw the drive away.

Bottom line, it works, if ya gotta.

I have an app where I need to email monthly invoices to each department, maybe 50 per month. This client uses Outlook and Access 2000. Is this doable? I know how to do this for a single report (and it works beautifully), but haven’t yet tried creating a blizzard of emails to different recipients all at once. Any problems you’re aware of?