If you’ve been using Access for some time like me you are probably familiar with the Calendar control – to let your users pick a date from a calendar instead of typing it in. Unfortunately in new versions of Microsoft Access this control doesn’t work any more – which affected me in upgrading the app I support from Office XP to Office 2010.
Unfortunately I started off in the wrong direction – using the “datepicker” – but it was another Active X control. I found out the hard way then that this Active X control didn’t work on everyone’s computers – so it was back to the drawing board.
Finally I figured out that the date picker is actually an extension of a text box in Access 2010. This doesn’t work with converted text boxes – but suddenly shows up for a new text box when you choose “Short Date” as the format. If you look down then a new option shows up – “Show Date Picker”. This is what causes the small calendar icon to show up next to a text field when the user clicks on it – EXACTLY what I was looking for! So when the user clicks on the calendar icon it displays a calendar for them to click the date on (pretty much what I did before with calendar control – but with custom code the connection between the objects – in my case with a pop-up window). I have to give credit to Microsoft on this one for doing it right – creating a built-in property that exactly that I – and others – are looking for.
I was actually trying to avoid this situation when I was converting from Access XP to Access 2010 – in that I was avoiding the use of as many external references as possible – as they’re not always consistent between computers. Strange was that I even though I tested it successfully on another computer (that only had Access 2010) - but not when it rolled out to the group. In this case there was a happy ending – with the best UI being implemented.
