Streamlining Decision Support Front Ends

Decision-support applications deliver information used by executive management to analyze business trends and by-line managers to analyze day-to-day performance of their business area and its staff. Most executives and line managers prefer graphs and charts to display trends, but deviations from expected results require display of detail data to pinpoint problem areas. Supervisors need more targeted data for monitoring employees' activities, such as reviewing order entry operations for accuracy and timeliness.

Decision-support applications involve read-only access to data, so you aren't limited to datasheet or form/subform views of queries. Access list boxes offer faster performance and easier multi-record navigation than forms and subforms, which are intended primarily for data entry. Combo boxes are the ideal control for letting users make ad hoc choices of the information they need to see.

Note

Online-data entry applications also can take advantage of list boxes for applications such as finding a specific customer and displaying the customer's orders. The A11Oltp.mdb application described in Chapter 14, "Creating and Using Access Forms," takes advantage of list boxes to display all historical customer and order data.

This chapter shows you how to combine combo boxes and list boxes with VBA code to create an interactive form for a simple decision-support application that includes a drill-down feature. You also learn how to generate Jet SQL and Transact-SQL (T-SQL) queries from selections made in list and combo boxes.