Access Fall 2002:

1. There is no built in report writing feature, crystal reports is suppressed to fill the void put the fields within DBA are not listed which makes writing a report from DBA very difficult.
2. It was desired in the customer support data base to track Instruments by serial number. Unfortunately in DBA you have to implement the feature, which was never implemented.
3. Due to the fact that this was a pre-written data base you were lieted to the frields and relationships that the designers thought were necessary which did not fit our specific needs.

So to over come these short commings we decided to implement our own parallel system using Access. My first step was to build the tables that I needed and then define the relationships. To obtain the data we first exported the necessary tables and then I designed various queries to message the data into a usefull format. One of the big issues here was that the serial numbers were stored in a comment section and there could be multiple serial numbers per invoice.

The work hourse of the system was what we called the Blue Form. It was here that all information about the call could be logged. If an RMA(Return to Manufactures Authorazation) was requiered then there was a macro that would generate the number to enter a record into the RMA table. This was requiered for billing purposes. Since we have many repairs done on the customer site by both sales reps as well as customers it was not required for the parts sheet. In order to enter a new serial number into the data base s seperate form was needed.

The forms were all based upon the following queries. Blue form query, parts sub-form query, Enter a new Serial#. Macro's were used to write form fields from one set of records to another. These fields were then save when the froms were saved.