Meeting
Access Europe – Tim Finch – Using Grid Lanes in Access
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This Access Europe meeting will be on Wednesday 5 May 2026 starting at 18:00 UK time (6PM UTC) and finishing at about 19:30 (7.30PM)
The start time is equivalent to 19:00 (7PM) in Central Europe and 10AM in Seattle / PST
Please note that the UK will be on Summer Time (UTC+1) for this meeting. For local times, please check World Time Buddy
When it’s time to join the meeting you can use the Zoom link below to connect:
https://zoom.us/j/92431295683?pwd=cThRS1JxRXhGdnBlNXZDVFdUMjNYUT09
You can click the button below to download a small calendar (.ics) file and add the meetings to your Outlook calendar. This will add a recurring appointment to the first Wednesday of each month.
Outlook Calendar (.ics)————————————————————————————————————————
Topic Outline:
This is a modified version of a presentation given by Tim Finch to the UK Access User Group in London in Oct 2025.
The idea for Grid Lanes was originally inspired by the work of Aleksander Wojtasz with interactive Gantt charts.
See the Sept 2024 Access Europe User Group session: Advanced Techniques with Interactive Gantt Charts
Grid lanes is a 2-dimensional grid on which users can place draggable objects and also place text inside. It is all programmed with GDI commands.
As an example, Tim has implemented the code for a Water Treatment Engineer company who send out engineers to clients every day and need to schedule the engineers geographically.
The grid is shown alongside an Edge browser control displaying Google Maps to visualize the daily route of each engineer.
This makes it easy to allocate each job to the most appropriate engineer so they simplify travel routes.
All code is wrapped in class modules with events that make it feel like a native Access control.
Background:
Tim started developing in MS Access in 1995 when a local motor bike leather suits manufacturer wanted to computerise their complex paper-based highly customised suit ordering process. They still use the hybrid MS Access/VB/Excel based system for capturing sales in 2026.
Tim studied Computer Science at City University as a mature student in the late 90s, and has worked as an IT Consultant in varying roles, with database design for multiple clients as a prominent part to the portfolio, ever since.
Tim is married to Barbara, has 2 older teenage daughters, and lives in Somerset UK. When he isn’t working, you’ll often find him playing piano or ‘keytar bass’ in his local church band.
