Screens

Work Records - The main screen and each record is a project (most of the time). The stack of records is sorted in descending order by work date so the most recent (or most future) stuff is on top. Across the top are some filters that enable you to filter the record stack by Customer, Analyst and by Project. You have to select a customer with the drop down arrow and then perform the filter by pressing the filter button. The button description will turn green indicating that that filter is engaged. I suppose the filter buttons should be anded. The Remove button was a compromise because I wanted some other way of turning off the filter - sort of like Excel. The lower left part of the screen is where the main part of the screen is and should be self-explanatory.

If a new record is entered and it isn't known when that work will take place, that record will appear in the right hand box. You will see the customer name and a truncated description. If you double-click on that record, you will be navigated to the full record for further entry.

The system was headed toward making a record for each piece of work. Most often one project was handled with one piece of work on one day. But there were times when the work would spill over onto another day and another record would be created for that analyst for that day. Or there were times when more than one analyst was assigned to the project. The Dupe button is very helpful here. The Project filter was designed for the operator to easily see all of the work for any given project number. Which brings me to…

There are 4 small indicators on the lower left, just above the record navigation buttons. The one to the left is the date the record was created. The one to the right of it is the person who entered the record (derived from the environment string). The box to the right of that is the record number and the last box is the project number. Project numbers were generated only with the Dupe button. If there was only one record for a simple piece of work then no project number was created. If the work required more than one record then the next incremented project number was created. I had a bit of a debate as to whether each record deserved its own project number if they were completed with only one record. In my view, anything that could be completed in a single record hardly qualified as a project and no project number was generated. But, the group was beating me up pretty well after a while and maybe they are right. (My ass!)

There's a nifty little calendar I got from Microsoft Access 2 Developer's Handbook by Getz, Litwin, and Reddick. I always felt that there could be a more useful navigational thing or data entry assistance thing that could be done with it but I never got around to it.

Customers - A table where various data elements are collected that describe the customers. There is an eRC button in the lower right. That button was destined to send this record to the Response Center - those folks would set up shared directories and home directories and we wanted a simple way to fill out the form and send it over to the folks responsible to set up that stuff. I never got to that and even if I did it might not work with your email system.

Departments - This form talked about each department and each sub-department. It is designed so that one person within a department could be a sub-department or dozens of people could be a sub department if they all had identical machines and software applications installed. The liaison is the contact person within each department who sets priorities for that department and to whom some reports are automatically sent.

Staff - A short list of the workers.

Reports - Nothing special here.

Tab 6 - is waiting for your modification.

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