Support for Forms and Reports on Large Monitors has appeared on the Access Roadmap (2 Viewers)

[Pat Hartman]

ou can of course already scale reports to fit one or multiple pages on the screen, either from the ribbon or from the zoom slider on the status bar.

I am talking about the way Excel does it. Not scaling it for viewing after I PERSONALLY formatted it to 8.5 x 11. Excel scales the font size to fit within the printer page.

As it turns out, I believe the big complaint was that it made Access forms move down slightly and, as a consequence, some forms had to be resized to fit the screen.

That has been the PITA.

 

[GPGeorge]

I am talking about the way Excel does it. Not scaling it for viewing after I PERSONALLY formatted it to 8.5 x 11. Excel scales the font size to fit within the printer page.

That has been the PITA.

Then large monitor support with responsive forms ought to prove useful. Three years after the fact of the thickened title bar, but to use a cliche, better late than never.

 

[Pat Hartman]

The large monitors are still pretty expensive relative to other monitors. I don't see many clients rushing out to buy new hardware.

 

[DHookom]

I recall a support call from client at least 20 years ago with a larger monitor. I had code that automatically set a subform width based on the main form’s InsideWidth. I had to modify the code to accommodate the issue.

 

[GPGeorge]

I don't have any idea what the "normal" developer/user has for monitors these days. I have a friend who is into old-school video games. He swears by the old CRT monitors for "true" color rendition in those games.

 

[isladogs]

I have used automatic form resizing code (aka responsive forms) for over 20 years with all my client apps. This was a necessity in all my schools apps with 200+ users whose monitors ranged from 10 inch 4:3 800*600 to 22 inch widescreen 1920*1080 (and everything in between).

As monitor sizes and resolutions have increased over the years, the code has continued to work perfectly with changes only needed to handle new control types such as navigation forms and modern charts.

The example app and code is one of the most downloaded items on my website indicating the issue is of importance to many developers

To me the main benefit of the forthcoming feature is that this functionality will be built-in to Access and will provide additional functionality that my code cannot do. For example it will hopefully also be available in design view.

As for large monitors exceeding 22 inches wide, the proportion of these in use will continue to increase year on year. Updating Access to support these will become increasingly important to ensure Access remains relevant both now and in the future

In summary, this feature is vital to future-proof the position of Access as a development tool

 

[KitaYama]

SQL Server Express

But you can not install it anywhere you want. According to documents, you need a dedicated server. and you know better than anybody else that managing and maintenance of a SQL server is on a different level.
I see some other suggestions by other members like using several BEs, etc. but all of them are workarounds. The problem is not solved and is still sitting there.

Perhaps I'm still missing something, though....

I accept and am with you on all what you said.
But as I said, there are priorities. The title bar was an example.
Imagine you're walking in a desert for ten days. Your body is screaming for a drop of water, but someone gives you a piece of pizza. Not that pizza is not good or you don't like it. It's simply not just the right time for it.

A while back, they added support for modern graphs. Give me a percentage of Access developers who need a modern graph in their apps. %1.0? %0.1? Even less? How many of us would be happier having a search box in vbe's property window (like navigation bar) rather than a modern graph functionality?
During my 1.5 years of stay in AWF (the most popular Access forum), I've seen only two or three thread about graphs. It simply shows how few people need it. Yet, they put effort to add it, but not a lot of more necessary features.
Access is a database (I know, RDBMS). In more than %99 of situations you don't analyze your data. If you need to, you send it to Excel which is much more powerful and have been made to analyze dada. Again not having these new features in Access is a bad idea, but not when we're suffering from thousands of must-be-added shortcoming in Access.

Access team is so involved in the details of something that they forget or do not realize the real purpose or importance of the thing as a whole. Sometimes when you concentrate on the minute details of a problem, you lose sight of the overall or you focus on the unimportant, rather than on the important things. Bottom line - you miss the big picture.

I have a question for you. As someone with a long carrier in developing Access databases, do you prefer having a descent vbe editor, with modern functionalities, (keyword highlight, folding, collapsing,..) or support for large monitors?
To be honest, I think notepad++ in all its simplicities, does a better job thant vbe editor in Office.

I just am saying give me a bottle of water when I'm thirsty. I'll have your pizza later.

And again, all my rants are toward Access team, not you. I appreciate your thread here and letting us know at least they're not deprecating Access and we have a future.

Thanks and cheers.

 

[CJ_London]

According to documents, you need a dedicated server.

I have installed express on my c drive for developing purposes and on shared drive for a client a few years ago

 

[GPGeorge]

I have installed express on my c drive for developing purposes and on shared drive for a client a few years ago

I missed that statement about a server. I have it SQL Server Express on each of my computers, currently two laptops and a tower PC. Not just one install, but three. Why? Because I can.

In my working days, I installed it SQL Server Express on one PC in a local workgroup of half a dozen PCs to replace an mdb that had grown to about 1.4 GB. They ran that configuration for years. The only problem was that the computer which had SSE on it had to be left powered on during the day when others were working. I can think of at least three other similar installations for clients. In each location, we installed SSE on one computer in the office and had Access running on up to half a dozen other workstations on a workgroup connecting to it. Not a server in sight. In two cases, we did have a server and a Domain and an IT guy who installed SQL Server Standard, though.

 

[Pat Hartman]

The title bar was an example.

This is the law of unintended consequences. This is a Windows issue as far as I can tell. Some bright bulb OK'd the change for Windows without thinking of how it might negatively affect Access. The Access team probably has no way to resolve this and the Windows team doesn't care.

PS displaying a report on a large monitor is not the same as printing it which is why I referred to how excel handles scaling.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The comment was made about folks not flocking to buy super-large monitors. But there are "desktop manager" packages out there that you can map subsets of a larger virtual space to be displayed on selected multiple monitors. Inside that larger virtual space, if Access tries to determine the size it has in order to adapt to its working area, it could see a lot more than 22 inches virtually available. I'm sure there are many ways around this, but I just wanted to remind folks that a 22 inch monitor is not required to get strange automatic adaptations to screen size.

 

[theDBguy]

Access team is so involved in the details of something that they forget or do not realize the real purpose or importance of the thing as a whole.

I wish there is a link that shows what areas of the user/developer experience that the Access Team can and cannot control. I am pretty sure the Ribbon UI and the VBE/IDE editors are not in their purview, so complaining to the Access Team about them is probably unproductive. Perhaps a good rule of thumb is if it's an area common to the entire Office Suite of products, then the Access Team probably has no control over it. Just my 2 cents...

 

[KitaYama]

I wish there is a link that shows what areas of the user/developer experience that the Access Team can and cannot control. I am pretty sure the Ribbon UI and the VBE/IDE editors are not in their purview, so complaining to the Access Team about them is probably unproductive. Perhaps a good rule of thumb is if it's an area common to the entire Office Suite of products, then the Access Team probably has no control over it. Just my 2 cents...

Yes, I wish too.
There are thousands and thousands of posts of users who try to change the height, but no one, neither from Access team nor Office team says a word. Access team could at least answer somewhere it's not within their limits.

As I said before, the height of title bar was just an example, but since it's been replied to, let me share you an image. here.
This is a side-by-side comparison between Access and another app on my PC.
Note: Office has not been updated, so the height of the title bar is still small.

Again : Office is not updated. So the height of the title bar is small.
I'm sure you see the difference between the ribbons. If I update office, the title bar will grow and would be exactly twice comparing current height.
I really don't know what apps you guys are using IN your profession, but for me, all apps have the same height of title bar and ribbon as the left side. It's only Office that doesn't care the amount of space a user needs to be left on his screen.

 

[KitaYama]

I have installed express on my c drive

I missed that statement about a server. I have it SQL Server Express on each of my computers, currently two laptops and a tower PC. Not just one install, but three. Why? Because I can.

@GPGeorge I really didn't expect this from you. Because you can doesn't mean you should.
Yes, I have sql server express on all my machines too. But it's only for my tests. and I'm sure both of you are using it for your tests too, not running a live project on your organization or your office.
You can always install an app on a system bellow it's requirements. But it doesn't mean it's a wise decision.

 

[GPGeorge]

@GPGeorge I really didn't expect this from you. Because you can doesn't mean you should.
Yes, I have sql server express on all my machines too. But it's only for my tests. and I'm sure both of you are using it for your tests too, not running a live project on your organization or your office.
You can always install an app on a system bellow it's requirements. But it doesn't mean it's a wise decision.

Perhaps I didn't make it clear. I retired more than 10 years ago. I can, and do, experiment a lot with different configurations. I haven't supported clients in many years.

If you actually look at the specs for SQL Server Express, you find that SSE is supported on the following versions of Windows, in addition to Windows Server (not shown).

SQL Server edition:

Enterprise

Developer

Standard

Web

Express

Windows 11 IoT Enterprise	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Windows 11 Enterprise	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Windows 11 Professional	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Windows 11 Home	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Windows 10 IoT Enterprise	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Windows 10 Enterprise	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Windows 10 Professional	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Windows 10 Home	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes

As I also stated in a different post, during my career, I installed, or helped install, SQL Server Express on a number of client's Workgroup connected computers .

So please stop telling me that it can't be done successfully.

 

[KitaYama]

I said dedicted server. not OS version. In production environments (specailly with high workloads) SQL server should not be installed on a machine that is used for other tasks. At least it's how I've been told and learned. I maybe wrong.

So please stop telling me that it can't be done successfully.

Ok. I stop here. It's my last word on it.

 

[GPGeorge]

I said dedicted server. not OS version. In production environments (specailly with high workloads) SQL server should not be installed on a machine that is used for other tasks. At least it's how I've been told and learned. I maybe wrong.

Ok. I stop here. It's my last word on it.

You did say dedicated server, correct.

You did not say dedicated workstation.

 

[KitaYama]

You did say dedicated server, correct.

You did not say dedicated workstation.

Now we're fighting over word definations:

server defination :

From google:
a computer or computer program which manages access to a centralized resource or service in a network.

from chatgpt:
A dedicated server refers to a physical machine that is exclusively used by a single client or organization. In other words, it is not shared with anyone else, and all the hardware resources (such as CPU, RAM, disk space, and network bandwidth) are dedicated solely to the user or application that owns it.

Let's stop here please. This discussion goes nowhere.
My apologies if I offended you. I didn't mean it the way you took it.