Replies

Oh woe is me … sendkeys are one of MS’ dodgiest ideas.
Still you’ve saved me a lot of time searching.
Thanks Charlotte.

PS: Sorry the reply is so late but on the day I first replied my machine crashed and it’s taken me a while to get back here.

We got it! One of our clever team sussed it out.
All you have to do is to change the target machine’s Regional Settings to English (United States), re-boot several times, install the package, change the Regional Settings back to English (Australian), re-boot several more times and heh presto – is don is good!

Now, at this point I could start a tirade about you-know-who thinking that American English is the only English in the world but you mightn’t understand 75% of the words so I think I will refrain myself.

Charlotte, your replies are a great encouragement and I don’t know how you make time to fit so many of us into your schedule. Thanks.

Oh Yeah! The funny thing is that it installs and runs perfectly well on a newly formatted machine but not on one that has Office 97 installed. I can’t guarantee that this is the only difference. We have tried running VB6 update on the target but it doesn’t help. The target machine has ie6 on it so it shouldn’t be an ie version problem. I wish ie was only an internet browser and not half a flaming operating system.

Do you use the packaging wizard or do you have a better way of doing it?

Where were you when I needed you?????

Thanks, that is much easier and just what I was looking for.

Well it’s not often you get to answer your own question but just in case someone else comes across this problem:

Use the “net config” command either from a Dos Prompt or within a batch or script file as follows:

net config server /srvcomment:”text”
eg
net config server /srvcomment:”John Doe’s Computer PIII 850 128MB”

NB: Just in case it is hard to read, there is a colon [:] just after the word srvcomment.

Credit to my good friend Blair who found the answer.

My understanding of the situation was that NT did not require defragging because NT defragged “on the fly”. The idea was that the operating system took care of defragmentation as it went about it’s business and therefore never needed defragging. I notice that 2000 has a built in defragging tool but I don’t know whether it is defragging files or just folder structures. It could be that it is not actually defragging files because it takes care of that as it goes. Not sure. In any case there was no defragging tool provided with NT.

Charlotte,

Do you mean:
You can sync design OR
You can sync data
but not concurrently.

or do you mean:
You can sync data but never design.

Later…..
Sorry, having read the rest of the posts about replication I can see what you mean is:
Make sure you don’t force replication of design and data at the same time because Access loses the plot when it tries to sync data in fields which no longer match up.

Jerry’s right. It works! Here are the steps.

1. Create a field in your database for the name of the file
In my case I have just a number eg 101 not even an extension
2. Open your form in design view
3. Add an unbound image control to your form
4. Attach any file to it from your hard disk
5. Change the picture property of the image to (none)
You must type in (none) including the brackets
The picture you attached is now gone and the control is blank
6. Size the image control to suit your form
7. Name the image “PhotoPreview” for example
You can do this by changing the name property in the properties sheet
7a. Change the Size Mode property of the image to Zoom
8. Make sure the file name field is on the form as a text control
It doesn’t matter whether this field is visible or not
9. Add a procedure call to the On Current event of the form
It should look something like this

Private Sub Form_Current()
SetPicturePreview
End Sub

10. Add a procedure call to the After Update event of the file name control
It should look something like this

Private Sub PhotoNumber_AfterUpdate()
SetPicturePreview
End Sub

11. Save and close the form
12. Add this code to a module

‘————————————————————
‘ Set Picture Preview
‘ This procedure sets the picture property of the unbound
‘ image to the file name of the picture for each record
‘————————————————————
Sub SetPicturePreview()
On Error GoTo SetPicturePreview_Err

With CodeContextObject
.PhotoPreview.Picture = .[PhotoNumber] & “.jpg”
End With

SetPicturePreview_Exit:
Exit Sub

SetPicturePreview_Err:
‘MsgBox Error$
Resume SetPicturePreview_Exit

End Sub

Now if you want to avoid putting the whole path into the file name field you can
change the procedure to this:

‘————————————————————
‘ Set Picture Preview
‘ This procedure sets the picture property of the unbound
‘ image to the file name of the picture for each record
‘ It finds the path to the picture relative to the path of
‘ the database which it gets from the CurrentDB.Name property
‘————————————————————
Sub SetPicturePreview()
On Error GoTo SetPicturePreview_Err
Dim DatabasePath As String

DatabasePath = CurrentDb.Name
DatabasePath = Left(DatabasePath, Len(DatabasePath) – 13) & “Photos”

With CodeContextObject
.PhotoPreview.Picture = DatabasePath & .[PhotoNumber] & “.jpg”
End With

SetPicturePreview_Exit:
Exit Sub

SetPicturePreview_Err:
‘MsgBox Error$
Resume SetPicturePreview_Exit

End Sub

I am going to change this because it shouldn’t look up the path for
each record. It should only look up the database path once when the
database is opened and store it in a table or once when the form is
opened and store it in an unbound control on the form.

Hope this helps.

Another good thumbnailer is Smaller Animals.

For the answer to your question I would buy Paintshop Pro and simply start the application from Access. I don’t think I would try to thumbnail within Access.

Blast!. I have just discovered the same problem. I found out that linking actually adds to the size of the database. From what I can work out about it, the image is still embedded when you use linking and a link is added to the database so that the image can be automatically updated. Here I was thinking that linking would mean that the images were not stored in the database but they are.
From what I can gather, Access stores images as bitmaps no matter what format you have them in to begin with. I had 300 .jpg photos, average about 10k each but they were about 340k as bitmaps. Hey presto 100MB Access file. Someone showed me a fantastic thumbnailer called Smaller Animals. It will thumbnail all the photos in a folder to your specifications. For reasonable size photos 8×10 150dpi it flies through them at about 1 per second. I then put the thumbnails into Access and a hyperlink to the full size photo underneath.

My question is: How can I show a preview of the hyperlinked photo and not have the OLE in the table at all. Is this possible?

Oh I love it, I love it.

That was exactly what I was looking for even though it took me an hour or so to figure out what you meant.

Thanks

I think an image control will not give you what you want. Because you have used an OLE field in the table you would need a bound object frame. An image control will not be able to be linked to the table in Access 97 (at least I can’t find a way of binding an image control to a table).

The quickest way I have found with powerpoint is to take a screen dump of the item you want and paste it into powerpoint. To do this follow this simple method:

Open form or report or any windows item
Press “Print Screen” button on keyboard
Move to powerpoint or word etc
Press Ctl+V to paste the result

Print screen will capture the whole screen and if you use Alt+PrintScreen you will capture only the active window. You will be able to resize the image. Also you can copy it into a picture editor program like Paintshop Pro and save it as a .jpg if you like. Good luck with it.

Good question and equally as good answer. I have been looking for this hint for a quite some time now. Thanks Charlotte!

I didn’t look in the MS knowledge base or download the file but I used the following method:

Open the report in design view
Open the properties sheet for the Detail section
Select the “On Format” Event
Select the elipses (…)
Select Macro Builder
View Conditions
Create condition eg [Field1]>0
Use Setvalue to set the control property eg Setvalue Item:[Field1].[Property1] Expression:Expression1
Close & Save the macro
Save the report
View the report

It turns out that once you change a property it remains in that condition for the rest of the fields in the report. To prevent this you have to set the property to a default value and then set it for the condition.
eg

Condition     Action
              Setvalue Item:[Field1].[Property1] Expression: Expression1
Condition1    Setvalue Item:[Field1].[Property1] Expression: Expression2

This takes two lines in the macro. The first condition is left blank to enable the value change every time the macro runs thus resetting your default.

Hint1: You could write code to do this but it is much easier to write a macro, especially if you are relatively new to Access.

Hint2: Code runs faster than a macro so now you can convert your macro to code (procedure) and delete the macro. The method is:

View the macros of your database
Right click the macro you created
Select Save As/Export..
Select Save as Visual Basic Module
Allow Error handling and comments
Click Convert

Heh presto! You now have a module with a similar name to that of the macro. You can now copy the procedure out of this module and into your other modules or leave it as it is (at least change the name to something sensible). Don’t forget to change the “On Format” event of the Details section of your Report to “Event Procedure” and call your new procedure from within this event procedure.
eg

Private Sub Detail_Format(Cancel As Integer, FormatCount As Integer)
    Field1Property1Change
End Sub

This has the advantage of being able to call your procedure from any report or event.

Dual booting is not simple and I just about guarantee you won’t do it with w98. In the end it will cause more trouble than it’s worth. Drive swapping could be an easier solution and you can buy swappable drives in a tray that can be removed from the front when the machine is asleep.