Reminder Popup Date
By Richard Rost
5 years ago
Timer Event, Reminder Popup, Based on Date
This video is a followup to my original Reminder Popups video. In that video we used a yes/no field to determine whether or not a customer needed a followup. So many of you responded and commented asking if we could base it on a date instead. So, here you go!
Dozens of People from Everywhere (Members & Non-Members) asked: Love the video on popup reminders. Is it possible to show a reminder based on a date, like an appointment or a followup date with a customer?
Members
I'll show you how to create a Snooze Button so you can snooze the reminder for whatever interval you want: 30 seconds, 5 minutes, 2 hours, etc.
Silver Members and up get access to view Extended Cut videos, when available. Gold Members can download the files from class plus get access to the Code Vault. If you're not a member, Join Today!
 Links
Original Reminder Popup: https://599cd.com/ReminderPopup
Concatenation: https://599cd.com/Concatenation
Intro In this video, I will show you how to create a reminder popup in Microsoft Access that is triggered by a follow-up date field instead of a simple Yes/No checkbox. You will learn how to update your tables and forms to use a date for reminders, modify the DLookup criteria to check for dates in the past or today, and adjust your timer event to handle date-based notifications. This tutorial is a direct response to viewer requests following my previous video on popup reminders using checkboxes.Transcript Welcome to another TechHelp video brought to you by AccessLearningZone.com. I am your instructor, Richard Rost.
Today's video is actually a sequel to my earlier Reminder Popup video. In the previous video, the reminder was based on a Yes/No field, a checkbox, either yes or no, for whether or not you have to follow up with this customer. Lots of you emailed me asking if that could be a date instead. You want to put a follow-up date in your table, so we'll cover that in this video.
This video goes out by popular request. This is one of those times where I've gotten dozens of emails and other comments about a previous video that I did. Lots of you said you enjoyed my previous video on popup reminders, but in that video I just used a checkbox, yes or no. Everyone's asking, can you base it on a date, like an appointment or a follow-up date? Of course you can. You just have to change the DLookup statement just a little bit.
Here's the template from that previous class. If you haven't watched that class yet, go watch it right now. There's a link down below in the links section. Gold members, you can grab a copy of this template from the download folder. Everyone else is going to have to build the database yourself, sorry. But it's good practice for you to build these databases along with me instead of just downloading the template.
This is the member template, and as you can see it's got a countdown timer on the main menu that pops up the notice window. I'm just going to pause that right now and then close this guy. I really need to start saving the free template too. I just usually save the members one. Let me go in here and revert this guy back to the way it used to be. I want to delete these controls here in the code that handle that.
Okay, so here we are, pretty much back to where we were before. In the original database, we looked up an ID from the customer table where IsActive is true. That's the criteria that we used to determine whether or not to open up the reminder window. Pretty much all we have to do is just substitute this with a date. So let's say we've got a follow-up date for our customers.
Let's go to our customer table, design view. Now I've already got a date in here that I really don't use. I've got this CustomerSince date. Let's just repurpose this. Let's call this FollowUpDate. Save that, and let's go in here and these follow-up dates that are in here. Let's get rid of these. Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. Let's put in there one from the past. Today is one twenty-one, I think it is. Yeah, today is the twenty-second, Friday the twenty-second. All right, so I'll put today's date in there for that one. Let's do one that's in the past that I should have called already. Let's put two in here that I don't have to call yet, so one twenty-five and then two five. Those shouldn't show up or shouldn't trigger the reminder window.
All right, let's adjust the customer form. Let me close this and reopen it. Main menu. Let's go to the customer form. Let's pop this notice up, of course, because it's still working on the IsActive. Let me undo that one. I think that's the only IsActive guy. Let's see. CustomerT. Where is IsActive? Yeah, okay, all of them are blank now, so I shouldn't see that reminder window at all.
All right, customer form. Let's redo the CustomerSince. Now you can see that Access changed the control source, the field that this guy is bound to, but it didn't change the name. So let's just take FollowUpDate. Copy that up here, paste. Let's get the same name, too. And the label, let's just update the label. All right, FollowUpDate. Okay, we're all set there.
Let's add this guy to the customer list, too. I'm just going to copy it from here, copy. Let's go to the customer list. Let's put it on here so we can see the FollowUpDate right next to these other guys. I'll just paste it right there. I'll get rid of the label. All right, slide you over here like that. Okay, let's make all of these guys right click size to grid. There we go. Any copy of this label, copy, paste. Slide it up here. FollowUpDate, just like that. Shrink that up, shrink that up, save it. Close it, close it, save it.
Right, customer list, there's my follow-ups, and you'll see why I wanted this here in a second. We're going to open this up to show you follow-ups. Okay, customer form's got it, customer list got it.
Okay, now let's go to our timer event, design view. Open this up, come down to the Event tab here. Come down to Timer Interval. Make sure that's whatever interval you want, we talked about that in the last class. Members, I know I set yours to 1000 for the one second timer. Make sure it's at five seconds or ten seconds or whatever. So 5000, I'm going to set mine to for five seconds. Remember these are milliseconds. Let's go into the timer event.
Right here is what we have to change. Now we're still looking up an ID. I still want to see if there are any customers in the customer table, but instead of IsActive equals true, we're going to say here FollowUpDate has to be less than or equal to, and then I'm going to put Now in there, but it's got to be inside of these guys, the pound symbols. Remember, if we're putting an actual date in here like 1/1/2000, it looks like that inside of date symbols, little hashtags or octothorpes, whatever you want to call them. All right, these guys. But I don't want the actual date in there, I want to put today's date in there. So I have to close that and date like that, and then open it back up again. All right, see what that does? That says, take today's date, put it between these guys, and put this in the criteria.
That's a little string concatenation. If you've never done concatenation before, I'll put a link down below in the video. Now, if you want just today's date, remember that's today's date at midnight. What if you had a follow-up for this morning at 7 a.m.? So, I like to put in here Now for something like this. That puts today's date and time in there. This way, if it's currently 9 a.m. and you've got a follow-up for 8 a.m., you can start using the time portion as well.
So I'll check it, base it on the date, it'll still return an ID. If that ID's not zero, open up the notice form. That's really the only major change we had to make.
All right, let's save that, close it, open it back up again, and let's wait five seconds. One, two, three, four, five, and there it is. There are customers to follow up with now. This guy right now, if I click open, it's displaying this form. Let's change what this guy displays, right click, design view, and I'm going to shut this so the timer event stops.
Here, it'd be nice if we could see the follow-up, so you have to make - let's open up the customer list form. Same kind of criteria here, right, FollowUpDate is less than or equal to Now, and we have to put that inside of these guys. Just like that. Save it, close it, chop it up, wrap it, and here we go. We'll wait five seconds. There it is. I remember this guy, this guy pops up where we saved it last, so slide it wherever you want it on your form and then it's saved. I'm going to put mine right next to the main menu right there, save.
Now, open, and there we go, there's the follow-ups that I have that are either now or in the past. Now, yeah, this guy is going to pop up every five seconds. Like I said in the last video, I'm going to assume you have this set to something like every 15 minutes or every half an hour so it doesn't keep popping up in your face. In the members video for the original class, I show you how you can make this guy pop up and then return focus to the form you were working on so it doesn't really interrupt you.
That's all you have to do to make this show up based on a date in your database instead of just a Yes/No box. It's just simply a matter of changing this.
Thank you all so very much for the feedback. I love getting feedback from you when I release a video. People ask lots of questions about it. Can we do this with it? Can we do that with it? I do keep all of those comments on a list and I do use them for future videos, especially when ten people have already asked me a specific question, whether they're members or not, and then a gold member asks the same thing and I'm like, oh wait, ten other people wanted to know this too, so then I'll do that one right away. Like this one, I got at least 20 or 30 people that sent me emails and posted comments about this.
Want to learn more? In the extended cut for members, I'll show you how to add a snooze button to the popup window so you can pick the snooze interval like don't bother me for an hour or two hours, or whatever interval you want to specify. Click the snooze button, it goes away. Plus, don't forget you get all the stuff from the previous extended cut video too, which is adding that countdown timer to your main menu so you can see it actually counting down. That's in the extended cut for members.
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Thanks for watching this video from AccessLearningZone.com.Quiz Q1. What was the main change requested by viewers for the reminder popup functionality?
A. Switching from a Yes No field to a Date field for follow-ups
B. Removing the reminder popup entirely
C. Adding a sound notification to the popup
D. Changing the design of the popup window
Q2. How did the original reminder popup determine whether to show the notice window?
A. It checked if the FollowUpDate field was filled
B. It used the IsActive Yes No field from the customer table
C. It looked at the customer's email address
D. It compared customer names alphabetically
Q3. To modify the database for date-based reminders, which field was repurposed in the customer table?
A. CustomerID
B. CustomerSince
C. FollowUpDate
D. IsActive
Q4. When updating the timer event to use a date, what date function is suggested to check for both date and time?
A. Date()
B. Time()
C. Now()
D. DateValue()
Q5. In the DLookup criteria for the date-based popup, why are pound/hash symbols (#) used?
A. To indicate text strings
B. To indicate boolean values
C. To indicate date values in Access queries
D. To indicate numeric values
Q6. What interval measurement is used for the Timer Interval property in Access forms?
A. Seconds
B. Minutes
C. Milliseconds
D. Hours
Q7. Where should the FollowUpDate field be displayed in the forms to allow users to see upcoming follow-ups?
A. Only in the table view
B. On both the customer form and customer list
C. Nowhere, it should be hidden
D. Only on the main menu
Q8. What additional feature is demonstrated for members in the extended cut of the video?
A. Printing the customer list
B. Adding a snooze button to the popup window
C. Sending emails to customers
D. Exporting data to Excel
Q9. What does the string concatenation in the DLookup statement allow the code to do?
A. Check multiple tables at once
B. Add numbers together
C. Insert variables like the current date/time into query criteria
D. Secure the database
Q10. Why is the reminder popup set to appear every five seconds only for demonstration purposes?
A. To annoy the user
B. To comply with database requirements
C. For testing; in real use, you should set a longer interval like 15 minutes
D. Because Access only supports five-second intervals
Answers: 1-A; 2-B; 3-C; 4-C; 5-C; 6-C; 7-B; 8-B; 9-C; 10-C
DISCLAIMER: Quiz questions are AI generated. If you find any that are wrong, don't make sense, or aren't related to the video topic at hand, then please post a comment and let me know. Thanks.Summary Today's video from Access Learning Zone builds on the previous lesson about Reminder Popups in Microsoft Access. In the original video, I showed you how to set up a popup reminder based on a Yes/No checkbox field, basically tracking whether you needed to follow up with a customer or not. After releasing that lesson, I received a lot of questions from viewers asking if the system could work using a date field instead. So, in this lesson, I will show you how to use a date to set your follow-up reminders.
This video, created in response to many requests, will guide you through replacing that checkbox with a follow-up date in your customer table. That way, you can specify exactly when you want to follow up with each customer, making your reminders more flexible and precise.
The starting point for this lesson is the template I provided in the previous class. If you have not seen that first video, I recommend watching it first to get up to speed. For members, you can download this template from the folder, but for everyone else, it is a good exercise to build these projects along with me.
In that original template, there is a countdown timer on the main menu, which triggers the popup notice. For this upgrade, I first reset my template back to the original state, removing the code and controls related to the previous method, so we are starting with a clean slate.
Originally, the database used a DLookup function to check for customers where the IsActive flag was set to true. That's how it determined when the reminder would appear. Here, the goal is to replace that logic so that it checks for a follow-up date instead.
To do this, I opened the customer table in design view. I already had a field called CustomerSince, which I was not using, so I repurposed it as FollowUpDate. I then cleaned up the sample data, removed old dates, and inserted new dates for testing: one with today's date and a couple more in the past and future. Only the records with today's date or a past date should trigger the reminder popup; future dates should not.
Next, I updated the customer form. When Access relabels a field, it changes the control source but not the control name. So I manually adjusted the field names and labels to show FollowUpDate correctly everywhere it's referenced.
The same update went into the customer list. I copied the FollowUpDate control into the list so all follow-up dates are visible next to other customer details. After lining things up and cleaning up the appearance, I saved all changes.
With the fields in place, I turned to the timer event on the main menu. You can set the timer interval to whatever you prefer, such as every 5, 10, or more seconds, remembering this uses milliseconds as units. For this demo, I set it at five seconds.
Now, the critical change was updating the DLookup statement. Instead of looking for IsActive equals true, the new version checks whether the FollowUpDate is less than or equal to Now. In Access, when specifying date criteria, you need to wrap the date value inside pound symbols. So, if you're checking against today's date (including the current time), you use Now. If you want just the current date at midnight, use Date instead. This method allows for more precise reminders, even down to the time of day.
With this logic, if the DLookup finds a customer ID with a follow-up date in the past or up to the current moment, the popup notice appears. That is the only major code change needed to base your reminder system on a date.
Once set up, you can test your reminder. Every five seconds, it will check for customers whose follow-up date is due or overdue and display the popup notice accordingly. I made sure the popup displayed the relevant customer information and updated the list form as well, using the same date criteria for consistency.
One thing to note: the reminder popup will appear as often as the timer is set. For real-world use, I recommend increasing the interval, perhaps to every 15 minutes or half hour, so it's helpful rather than intrusive. In the members-only extended video, I also show a trick that lets the popup appear without interrupting what you are working on, returning focus to your previous task after showing the notice.
With this adjustment, you can now track follow-ups based directly on dates instead of just a simple yes or no checkbox. All that was required was a straightforward tweak to the DLookup logic in your timer event.
Thank you to everyone who sent feedback on the original video. I keep track of all viewer comments and ideas, and when I see a topic come up frequently, I make it a priority for future videos. This was one of those topics that many people asked about.
For those who want to take this system even further, in today's Extended Cut for members, I will demonstrate how to add a snooze button to the popup reminder window. You will be able to choose the snooze interval, such as an hour or two hours, to pause the reminder for your chosen duration. The Extended Cut also includes tips from the previous members-only video, like adding a countdown timer to your main menu for a live display of time remaining until your next follow-up.
Silver members and up get access to all of my extended cut videos, which now number over a hundred, with plenty of content for Access users at all skill levels. Gold members can also download sample databases and access my code vault, while Platinum members enjoy access to my full beginner and many expert courses, covering not just Access but also Word, Excel, Visual Basic, ASP, and more.
As always, I will continue releasing these free TechHelp videos for everyone, so keep watching and sharing your feedback and questions. If you enjoyed this lesson, please give it a thumbs up and leave a comment below. Make sure to subscribe to the channel and activate notifications so you do not miss future releases. For additional resources, further learning, and related videos, check out the links available beneath the video.
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To get your question answered in a future TechHelp video, head over to my website's TechHelp page and submit your inquiry.
You can find a complete video tutorial with step-by-step instructions on everything discussed here on my website at the link below. Live long and prosper, my friends.Topic List Changing popup reminders from Yes No fields to date-based
Modifying the customer table to add a FollowUpDate field
Editing form controls to use the FollowUpDate field
Adding the FollowUpDate field to forms and lists
Updating DLookup criteria to check date values
Using date formatting in Access criteria with pound symbols
Employing Now to incorporate date and time in reminders
Adjusting Timer Interval for the popup system
Testing reminder popups with various follow-up dates
Ensuring reminder triggers only for dates past or equal to now
Customizing the notice form to show follow-up information |
