GUI creator for Access

[ShaneHeasley]

Can anyone suggest a professional level 3rd party or any program that creates GUI's for Access 2000? We make a lot of these databases for clients and want to be able to give them a more polished look and feel without expending a huge amount of effort hand coding.

Thanks!

http://www.progressolutions.com

 

[MichaelRed]

MS. Access includes a Form wizzard which offers a number of reasonable options for semi-custom forms. What - beyond this do you want? Contact me directly w/ a sample of the db and what you would want for the forms, I'll see if there is anything I can suggest. At the nmoment I'm "between" jobs, so I can take some extra time.


MichaelRed
redmsp@erols.com

There is never time to do it right but there is always time to do it over

 

[ShaneHeasley]

The standard look and feel of Access is very limited. Even using an HTML/intranet type of frontend for Access is limiting. One can change colors, add backgrounds, shadow, chisel etc. but what we are looking for is the ability to radicaly alter everything visual - round buttons and fields, animation, basically a design studio written in VB or C++ or whatever that gives us complete visual creative control.

Or if nothing like that exists, and I haven't seen anything on the market, then we would be willing to buy single look but unique GUI's from third parties.

Thanks for the reply.

http://www.progressolutions.com

 

[Guest_imported]

The tool you should use is Visual Basic. If you're using Access your code is pretty much VB now, a monkey could build a frontend. VB6 has a dataforms Wizard for crying out loud; give it a datasource, fields/query to select, and bingo! Instant standalone app. And while VB is somewhat limited out of the box, there are enough tools and support available that you can do almost anything with it if you try hard enough. The only problem would be if you do work with multiple OS's, VB is pretty much Windows only.X-)

 

[Cleis]

I could't disagree more! I've found that most programmers can't develop a functional AND clean front end; from an end-users prospective! Many front ends that I've seen look like they were put together by monkeys! Oh sure the code is slick and well thought out, but that's only 50% of the package. Many apps that I've seen have user iterfaces that are either:

1. Way to cluttered and overbearing.
2. Controls are not logically laid out
3. Controls not snapped to grid
4. No thought to simple things like highlighting current controls
5. and Just plain ugly

Sure I could go on and on but the simple fact is, many programmers but not all; just don't invest the time in the user interface.

I'm of the opinion that one should spend as much time possible laying out all forms and reports. I believe that this plays a HUGH factor in end user acceptance of the App.

Just my opinion!

 

[ghubbell]

Hmmm,
Are we forgetting ActiveX? You have at your disposal right now, access to a ton of wonderful controls. Most are standard issue with Windows, and if you're a developer you should be using a developer’s edition which ships with even more (and samples). Besides being ultra efficient, these controls can be set and tuned to give good looks and add professionalism to any Access database form. Perhaps investigate ActiveX (.ocx) in Access help or over at Microsoft.
Gord
gord@ghubbell.com