Support for Forms and Reports on Large Monitors has appeared on the Access Roadmap (3 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