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This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

Radio Buttons in MS-Access

Radio Button in MS-Access

In MS-Access, it is possible to make use of Radio Buttons. They work just like in any other system. The last selected radio button represents the result of the selection. The problem is: how do you make multiple radio buttons work in concert?

Your first reaction is to simply add some radio buttons on your form. That looks fine. Seems to work actually. Somehow they are shown in a "3rd state". That state actually shows you that the radio buttons are not initialized. So it is not helpful in any way.

So... Now we have a radio button and... you try to ...

Strong typing for a Recordset failing

When I looked around for samples on how to query a MS-Access database using an SQL statement, it was telling me to declare a record set variable of type Recordset.

Problem: Associate, easy! De-associate... but how?!

The association of a label with another widget is easy to obtain. You want to do that especially if you want to hide the widget or apply some similar effects to it so both, the widget and its label are affected. This is especially true if you hide the widget.

Spaces in database column names

Most of the database systems I've worked with do not support having column names with a space.

Oracle and PostgreSQL accept double quotes for that purpose (i.e. "First Name").

MS-Access and MySQL accept back quotes (i.e. `First Name`)

Visual Basic accepts square brackets (i.e. [First Name])

Obviously, this is just plain craziness! One should just never use spaces in such a place since it completely breaks the object oriented capabilities of pretty much any sensical language.

Error: Too few parameters. Expected 1.

What a strange error!

You execute an SQL statement with the usual OpenRecordset() function in MS-Access. So as usual, you put one parameter to the function, the SQL order.

You have written 100 of those before and had no problems.

Today, the last one you wrote says:

Too few parameters. Expected 1.

You look at this latest statement and your older statements and you just plainly don't get it. There is one parameter, it is the SQL string and it looks just fine.

So? What's wrong?

Simple! The error actually means a field name in the SQL statement is wrong. Yeah! That's how you need

ComboBox bug

I created a form in MS-Access and noticed, after a little while, that a ComboBox would not render properly.

The problem is pretty simple, I marked the combo box as having a Normal Back Style. When I first open the window or when I click in that ComboBox, it works and renders the specified Back Color. That's great, but that's not exactly the solution, is it?

The box has a Fore Color of Black (that's the color of the text). That Fore Color is used because the background is expected to be either gray or green. Either way, black shows pretty well.

MS-Access weird = [Field] error...

I started using MS-Access not too long ago, but this one is really getting me each time.

Once in a while I get this error telling me that the Form is messed up, that a field or a macro just do not match. That macros are missing even though I ask the Form to call the corresponding functions. And some other strangeness like those.

Ensure rendering happens in MS-Access

Today I bumped in another problem: I want to show my user a message saying that I'm terribly busy looking for data in the database. Because I use ODBC with QuickBooks (QODBC to be precise), the system is somewhat slow. Therefore, it can take a little while and people just can't wait and they start clicking everywhere like crazy. That's a big problem...

Problem

I had a problem with my CuteMenu1 module and tried many times to fix it but just could not find the problem with Internet Explorer.

The fact is that I created dropdowns that are supposed to be full width, but that did not work, somehow.

I wanted each item to have a pre-defined height. So in the style for my DIV I wrote this:

[toc hidden:1]

1. This is a Drupal module. You happen to have Drupal? Download CuteMenu now then!

View & Track tabs in Drupal sites

If you have your own Drupal site, you may have noticed a set of tabs appearing at the top. The View and the Track tab often appear on your site even for anonymous users. This is really annoying!

Here I show you what I see when I go to one of my pages. The View, Edit and Track tabs.

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

Thank you for visiting my website.

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Radio Button in MS-Access

Problem: Associate, easy! De-associate... but how?!

Problem