Access Europe – Dale Fye (Working with Command Bars and the Access Shortcut Tool)

Please join us for our monthly Access Europe session on Wed 3 Apr 2024 at 18:00 (6:00PM) London time (UTC+1)

This month, former MVP, Dale Fye will be leading a presentation in which he will first discuss his Advanced Shortcut Tool for working with Command Bars. He will then explain a Simple Audit Log he created for a client.

Topic outline:

Command bars and the Access Shortcut Tool:

After hearing many people complain on the various internet forums, and some discussions with other Access MVPs, Dale developed the Access Shortcut Tool to simplify the process of creating shortcut menus for use in Access applications. He did a lot of research during this process and wrote several articles for Experts-Exchange on the subject:

The Access Shortcut Tool is the culmination of his research into Command bars (shortcut menus).

Simple Audit Log:

A number of years ago, Dale had a client who needed to track all changes made within a database application. This was a financial database and he needed to be able to track whenever the value in any field in several of the database tables was changed. At the time, Dale found a workable solution that had been created and documented by the renowned Access MVP Allen Browne, so he started using it.

However, Allen’s solution required a separate history table for every table that was being logged, and wrote an entire record to that table whenever any field in the source table was changed. This resulted in some very large history tables.

In 2017, Dale had the occasion to revisit the need for an audit log for another project, and decided that he could write a relatively streamlined version of the process, with a single history table, and where he only logged the changes to each record. Dale developed his own Simple Audit Log. This application is form centric, it does not track changes made directly in tables. However, with relatively simple modifications, it can be modified to handle changes made through bulk imports and deletions.

Background:

Dale is a retired Army officer with a Masters Degree in Operations Research.

He spent the last ten years of his active military career doing data analysis and developing database applications in a combination of dBase, Clipper, and early versions of Microsoft Access. In total, Dale has over 29 years working with Access and a dozen years working with SQL Server (off and on).

Dale has participated in various on-line forums for Access for over twenty years and was selected as an Access MVP in 2013. He remained an MVP through to 2016, when family medical issues forced him to reduce the time spent on the various forums.

Dale worked as a database developer for a variety of US Government agencies and private corporations, until he started his own software company (Dev-Soln, LLC) in 2010. In 2014, Dale quit his day job and has been operating solely as a one-man development shop ever since.

Based in the USA, Dale was president of the Eastern Time chapter of AccessUserGroups.org until 2022.

His website is http://dev-soln.com

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