Access Europe – Aleksander Wojtasz – Interactive Gantt Chart Scheduler in Access

Please join us for our monthly Access Europe session on Wed 5 Jul 2023 at 18:00 (6:00PM) London time (UTC+1)

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Definition:

A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart used to display a project schedule. These were designed and popularized by Henry Gantt around the years 1910–1915. Modern Gantt charts also show the dependency relationships between activities and the current schedule status.

Tasks to be performed are shown on the vertical axis, and time intervals on the horizontal axis. The width of the horizontal bars in the graph shows the duration of each activity.

Topic outline:

In many database solutions, there is often a need to present data in the form of a Gantt chart. For example, in the processes of production planning, team task management, hotel room reservations etc.

It is also convenient to edit this data interactively on the chart, as this allows you to handle possible collisions and manage the overload of certain resources etc. This session will demonstrate how creating interactive Gantt charts for Microsoft Access makes it easy to manage such database solutions.

1.  Brief explanation – how the solution works
a)  Draw:  Library that allows drawing in real time on Access form using gdi32 API function calls
b)  Capture mouse position + mouse down/up clicks  – standard events: mouse move, mouse down, mouse up

2. Deeper Description of Graphical Library
a)  Starting point – Stephen Lebans clsPictureBox library form
b)  What is gdi32? Brief explanation
c)  How we can call the gdi32 library (invoke library function calls with use Declare)
d)  How the library transfers output image created in memory area into Access Image Control
e)  Basic draw operations:

  • setting the pen:  line width, line style, line color
  • setting the brush: fill color, fill style
  • setting the font : font name, size, style (bold, italic)
  • draw lines / rectangles
  • draw text (text rectangle, alignment, line split)
  • draw small pictures (buffered small icons) in the main picture

3.  Deeper Description of Mouse Events on Access forms 

a)  mouse down, mouse up, mouse move – events
b)  positioning – convert twips to pixels

4.  Putting everything together
a)  create data structures for Gantt Chart (use of Scripting.Dictionary to keep data records in memory)
b)  Sample drawing procedures
c)  Integrate drawing (refresh procedures) with mouse events

Biography:

– Active as MS Access programmer since 2005
– Working mostly as software developer in production companies – creating bespoke solutions to solve specific problems or cover very specific business processes.
– Last 4 years working mostly for financial banking company.
– Areas of interest: Using Access in both standard and atypical ways
– Big fan of web browser solutions: HTML+CSS+JavaScript

We hope you will join us for what promises to be a very innovative use of Access

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IMPORTANT NOTE: 

All sessions will be recorded and later uploaded to the AccessUserGroups channel on YouTube: AccessUserGroups.org – YouTube.

If you do not wish to be part of the recording, please ensure your webcam and microphone are both switched off.

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