Figuring Out Business Tasks and Objects

When designing an application for a client, after obtaining a reasonable quantity of representative data, you need to discuss the processes to be modeled in the application—not just how they are done currently, but how they could be done better and more efficiently. For example, users may have been typing data into textboxes; if the data is limited in nature (for example, sales regions or phone number types) a combobox with a lookup table as its row source will ensure that users don’t mistype an entry, which would cause problems when sorting or filtering data later on.

A client may give you piles of paper documentation, or descriptions of business processes, which again may or may not be helpful, depending on how well thought out these processes are. Often, real-world business practices develop bit by bit over the years, with new procedures not being integrated with older processes as well as they might be. When designing an application, it’s a good idea to review the existing procedures and consider whether they should be streamlined for greater efficiency when setting up the database.

Don’t just attempt to duplicate existing business processes in your database—at least not without examining them closely. Upon examination, you will often find that there are serious gaps in procedures that need to be remedied in the database. Just because users have been manually typing customer letters in Word and typing the customer address off the screen from a database record doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t generate Word letters automatically. (See Chapter 11, Working with Word, for information about generating Word letters from an Access database.)

You may also see that your application could do some tasks that aren’t being done at all, but that would be very useful, such as generating email to clients, or analyzing data in PivotTables or PivotCharts. See Chapter 12, Working with Outlook, for information on sending email messages from Access. But the application first needs tables to store data, so the initial task is to set up the database’s tables.