Re: Access 2007 Rich Text Deficiencies?

Wow, you sound pretty hostile.

First, I think what other rich text controls had before *is* significant.
Microsoft, in their documentation, states that now that rich text is
provided native to Access you no longer need to use an ActiveX control to
use rich text. So, clearly, they intend for the native rich text to replace
rich text controls.

Second, this isn't a discussion about what Microsoft "should" or "shouldn't"
do. It's a discussion about what capabilities are provided by the new rich
text feature in Access, and whether those could be used as a replacement for
an ActiveX control. The end of this discussion (where you are now coming in)
is that, no, the rich text capabilities are not as good as what's available
with ActiveX controls in many ways, and the Access rich text capabitlies
are, in fact, very rudimentary.

Third, regarding your point that rich text has no place in databases:
clearly you have a very narrow view of what databases can be used for. And,
I suppose, since you've never come across a situation where you needed rich
text in a database, your perspective on the situation is somewhat narrow.

As for that rich text belongs in a word processor, that's exactly the
position my client started at about ten years ago. They have a series of
formatted documents, each one of which describes one of their items. Since
they needed to be able to apply bold and italic within paragraphs, they
could not produce these as Access reports. So they created a series of Word
documents, which is in accordance with what you are recommending. There are
currently several thousand of these documents.

The problem is that they need to use the text in more than one format. So,
as a result, for each document, they need to save it as a sister document,
edit that sister document, even though both share most of the same text.
They are also in need of a couple more formats, which means that for each
item there will be a set of four documents, each of which have most of the
same text, but different format. These documents need to be manually
managed.

Instead of manually creating Word documents and making copies of the
documents every time a new format is needed, a far superior approach is to
break the documents down to their key text components, store those in the
database, using rich text, and mix and match them as needed to create
whatever documents are needed when they're needed.

In addition to alleviating the need to create multiple copies of each
document, it also allows the text in the documents to be easily searched,
filtered, reported on, etc., etc. Also, being able to view the description
in an Access report, using rich text (again, so that bold and italic within
a paragraph can be applied) is much, much faster and uses far less overhead
than opening Word through automation and viewing the document in Word. And,
if the format of a type of document ever changes, that format can be easily
applied by simply changing the Access report that creates the document,
rather than manually going into several thousand documents and adjusting
them.

So I would have to strongly disagree with you that rich text has very little
real value in a database application, and that rich text should only be
stored in word processing software, not in database tables. In my client's
application, storing the rich text in word processing software (as they have
been doing) is definitely *not* the way to go, and using rich text controls
within Access to be able to generate the documents on the fly is a far
superior approach. I'd have to strongly disagree with you there.

But I wonder why the hostile tone in your message? Are you trying to defend
Microsoft, and you feel that I was bashing them or Access 2007 in my
message? Otherwise, I fail to understand why you took such a hostile tone in
a technical discussion.

Neil


"Rick Brandt" <rickbrandt2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:zj0di.4275$c06.3480@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Neil wrote:
The point was whether it was worthwhile to upgrade to A07 in order to
use the built-in rich text capabilities. Using built-in features is
usually preferred to using an ActiveX control.

Also, the MS Rich Textbox control has problems after A2000. So it's
either go with a different control or use the A07 built-in rich text
capabilities. Plus, the MS Rich Textbox control doesn't support full
text justification (which I need), so I was hoping the A07 rich text
capabilities did. But, apparently, they're not ready for prime time,
and they don't.

Point 1) In my opinion rich text has very little *real* value in a
database application. It screws you on just about anything that a
database needs to do with data. ANY limitations encountered when using
Rich Text should be attributed to using a database to store data not well
suited to databases in the first place. I.e . rich rext belongs in word
processing software, not in database tables.

Point 2) The rich text in Access 2007 is designed from the get-go to be
compatible with Sharepoint. MS couldn't care less about whatever
previous Rich Text control you might have been using and what features it
provided. In other words, previously there was nothing (native), and now
there is something for dealing with formatted text. Anything you were
accomplishing before with non-native controls is beside the point.

They might make the control more feature rich in the future, but only as
required to fit the vision that MS has for the feature in their broader
strategic goals. How *other* rich text controls work is not likely to be
much of a consideration.

--
Rick Brandt, Microsoft Access MVP
Email (as appropriate) to...
RBrandt at Hunter dot com







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