Input Mask or Validation?

[David W. Fenton]

It was still a pain to have to be sure you clicked at the very
beginning of the text box,

Well, I think using the mouse to navigate is at odds with the data
entry process. Did you consider using the OnEnter event (perhaps
combined with the OnMouseUp event) to set the selection point to the
beginning of the field? Of course, that could mean that if you tried
to click in, say, the year portion of the date masks you'd end up
having to click a second time, but this is one of those cases where
it seems to me that keyboard navigation is vastly superior, both for
navigating between fields and within a field. Sounds like a training
issue to me (and I've spent years trying to train people to use both
mouse and keyboard selectively, each for what is most appropriate).

but it did enforce four digits for the year; perhaps we could
have done it in a more user-friendly way with VBA validation code,
but that would have been more work (and the client wasn't wiling
to fund that extra work, either).

Validating dates in code manurally is actually a lot more
complicated than you might think (for a recent app, I had to write a
dialog to parse a free text field to format the date parts as
accurately as possible; had I known beforehand how nearly impossible
it was, I would not have suggested trying to implement it).

 

[Larry Linson]

These were not "data entry personnel". They were real estate specialists who
were entering, at most, one screen at a time. And, even more often, a field
or a few fields at a time. I knew/know the drill for Input Masks, but
didn't/don't always remember which fields have them.

Because of my personal experience with them, I just don't use them, ever
(well, hardly ever). I've done data entry applications in my time, but
never did one in Access. And, for sure, tabbing into the field would have
prevented the problem.

Larry

 

[David W. Fenton]

tabbing into the field would have
prevented the problem.

A keyboard shortcut on the field's lable would have, too.

And I'm still not convinced that you couldn't ameliorate the mousing
problem by setting the selection point in a way that would be
non-annoying for the few cases when you really *wanted* to set the
pointer somewhere other than the beginning of the field. Perhaps you
could set the selection point in the OnEnter when the field is Null.
That would still have the problem your users encountered when the
field was not Null, but my guess is that that would have been a much
smaller proportion of instances where the problem arose.

 

[Larry Linson]

That's a thought should the situation arise again.

That particular database was replaced by "A Web Application" shortly after
the company merged with another one about ten years ago. If a copy exists
anywhere, it'd only be because legal requirements forced them to save a copy
in a box somewhere deep in a storage facility like Iron Mountain.

It's incredible that they spent a huge amount having us do Y2K remediation
only to trash the application within a few months. Even worse for the prime
contractor, he let himself be bullied into taking a fixed price contract,
dutifully paid his subs (including me), then was called back several/many
times to do more and redo some, and ended up losing money on it, when all
was said and done.

Larry

 

[David W. Fenton]

It's incredible that they spent a huge amount having us do Y2K
remediation only to trash the application within a few months.
Even worse for the prime contractor, he let himself be bullied
into taking a fixed price contract, dutifully paid his subs
(including me), then was called back several/many times to do more
and redo some, and ended up losing money on it, when all was said
and done.

Well, maybe you're bad luck, Larry, since I never got paid for the
work you did for me! Not your fault, of course, and you earned your
pay, but it took a bite out of my budget at the time. Fortunately, I
had more margin for the unforeseen back then than I have now. Today
I wouldn't be able to hire anyone, and the few times I've done it
since, I made the client pay the subcontractors directly.