Technology for the visually disabled

Just a quickie - but an important one.

A slideshow of stuff at a recent Technshare exhibition run by the Royal National Institute of Blind People. Lots of ways technology can make people's lives easier if they have a visual impairment.

And (and this is two for the price of one territory here...) a gizmo which allows people to read audio labels - little sticky labels with data in them. Potentially a brilliant way of using the potential of data stores to get smaller and smaller and employ an effective interface.

Cool.

Might be v useful to know about this sort of stuff.

The Order Form Dilemma

Dear Deidrie,

I have a bit of a dilemma with my ordering system. I try and I try but it just won't work.

Can you help me get it all fixed and lovely?

Worried of Saxmundham

Hi Worried,

No problem you, we'll have you sorted in a jiffy.

To start with, this is how your table might want to look:

Notice that there's only one set of information in the tblOrderLine. I've cut off the screenshot to make it more visible - there's a lookup table over on the right for those of you not familiar with the admittedly unusual example Worried has chosen here.

You'll notice as well that the referential integrity has been enforced. I always think you can never have too much referential integrity.

What might not be obvious at first glance is that there's no Primary Key in tblOrderLine...

Once you have your tables sorted it's plain sailing. The juice covered textbook has information on or about page 250 which might come in jolly handy.

It will involve setting up a query a bit like this one.

Notice there's more than one table involved there. There's also a calculated field at the end for the cost: Cost:[Price]*[Quantity] or something similar.

Oh, a tip: try sorting the field on Order Number. You might just find it saves a bit of head scratching later on.

Then you can set up an Order Form a bit like this one.

You need to get the Form Wizard to wave his magic wand on this one as you're taking stuff from three places: tblCustomer, tblOrder and qryOrderedProduct. Fun - slightly confusing fun the first time you do it, but in my experience most of the best things are.

You'll notice I've used some of the Cool Formy Things, like a Calendar control and a spinner, to increase the usability of the form. I've also taken a bit of time to get the layout as clear and usable as I can. I'm like that. Some people would say obsessive, others might just say odd.

So, Worried of Saxmundham, hopefully that might help. If it doesn't then I can recommend a nice crisp Chablis if that helps?

Best wishes,

Deidrie xxx

Adding stuff to a database field

So, you have a database table.

There's a field that you want to add something like Amps to. So it's going to be, like 13 Amps or 5 Amps or whathaveyou. Always Amps.

Easy to do.

The field type'll need to be text for this.

Then you simply set up the Input Mask in this sort of way:

This should work for text fields as well - you simply need to make sure the input mask characters work properly the way you want them to.

The section in the textbook on Input Masks is p.28-29 - assuming you haven't spilt orange juice over your textbook so you can still read the pages.

You can do the same thing for an Autonumber field as well - say that you need to add a standard set of text before a stock code for example. In this case the Input Mask simply needs to be something like "STA"000 and the field type Autonumber.

All of this adds usability to your database. It makes it easier for the user to use it. This is a Good Thing.