Chapter 18 ReadMe

The pictures in tblContacts (and displayed in frmContacts) were taken from a 1930 high school yearbook: http://www.hampdencountyhistory.com/springfield/tech_1930/index.html. I used these pictures because they are not copyrighted, are black-and-white (requiring less disk space than color pictures), and are fairly uniform in size (making it very easy to fit them into an Access form). I used SnagIt (www.techsmith.com) to capture the images directly from the Web page.

Not all of the 100 records in tblContacts have pictures. Right-click on the OLE Object control on frmContacts, and select Insert Object to add a picture from a file (.jpg, .bmp, etc.) or to create an entirey new file. Alternatively, use a tool such as SnagIt to capture an image to the Windows Clipboard and paste the image into the control.

Be aware that adding a lot of pictures to an Access table dramatically increases the size of the database file, even when the Preserve Source Image Format option is selected in the Current Database options (File-->Options-->Current Database-->Application Options).

Similarly, tblProducts is missing pictures for many of the product records. The Collectible Mini Cars folder containing the completed application includes two subfolders (CarPictures_Small and CarPictures_Large) you can use to populate the records without pictures. Be careful not to add too many pictures directly to the products table because of the issues with the database file becoming so large. You may be better off linking to car pictures than embedding them in the database.

Chapter18.accdb includes two additional versions (frmContacts_LayoutView and frmContacts_MultipleItems) of the contacts forms. These additional forms are provided as examples of a form created with the Form and More Forms-->Multiple Items buttons in the Forms group on the Create ribbon tab. They are not used by any of the examples in Chapter 18.

The text boxes on frmCalculatedControlDemo have their Enabled property set to No, and their Locked property set to Yes. This combination prevents the user from changing the values in the controls, yet allows the controls to appear "normal" -- they are not grayed out the way that disabled controls are shown on Access forms.