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work frustration
Jul. 11th, 2006 11:52 amA bunch of years ago, at my previous job, I worked in Microsoft Access, a lot.
No, more than that, including faking a client-server database for my department to track accrued vacation time for workers, as well as their status (working, not working, disabled, terminated ... ).
Since I was tracking well over 200 employees, the form that listed individual employees got rather ... awkward to flip through (I wanted to look at the record for Joe Smith, not Amy Alvarado!). I kludged together something that let you look at a drop-down list of letters, and push a button, and the form would display only the workers whose last name started with that letter. It clanked a bit, but it actually worked, and I was happy.
At least until my job was restructured out of existance, but that's a tale for another time.
Since I'd had a bit of lead time for the departure, I warned my supervisors and got their blessing to snag a copy of the database (with dummy data, because the original data was confidential), burn it to CD and keep it for my reference and my personal "gee, I can do that" computer portfolio.
Now, at the current (temp!) job, I've been asked to perform the same magic in a new database (filter by first letter of last name ...
and all my examples are at home!
So I'm sitting here, twiddling my thumbs (not useful), trying to find the answers in the help files (uh, yeah), and searching online in the microsoft and other websites (twiddling my thumbs is more useful).
edit: the problem has been solved, in a different way than I did before, but it works, and hopefully the co-worker I built this for will be satisfied. I'm still frustrated, mainly by the erosion of my L33t Access skills.
No, more than that, including faking a client-server database for my department to track accrued vacation time for workers, as well as their status (working, not working, disabled, terminated ... ).
Since I was tracking well over 200 employees, the form that listed individual employees got rather ... awkward to flip through (I wanted to look at the record for Joe Smith, not Amy Alvarado!). I kludged together something that let you look at a drop-down list of letters, and push a button, and the form would display only the workers whose last name started with that letter. It clanked a bit, but it actually worked, and I was happy.
At least until my job was restructured out of existance, but that's a tale for another time.
Since I'd had a bit of lead time for the departure, I warned my supervisors and got their blessing to snag a copy of the database (with dummy data, because the original data was confidential), burn it to CD and keep it for my reference and my personal "gee, I can do that" computer portfolio.
Now, at the current (temp!) job, I've been asked to perform the same magic in a new database (filter by first letter of last name ...
and all my examples are at home!
So I'm sitting here, twiddling my thumbs (not useful), trying to find the answers in the help files (uh, yeah), and searching online in the microsoft and other websites (twiddling my thumbs is more useful).
edit: the problem has been solved, in a different way than I did before, but it works, and hopefully the co-worker I built this for will be satisfied. I'm still frustrated, mainly by the erosion of my L33t Access skills.
