Today is another quick queries video. We're up to number 14. This is where I take questions that you guys send to me or post in my forums or post on my YouTube channel, and I do my best to answer them. These may or may not be questions that need a whole video on their own. So let's get to it.

First up is a question from Benjamin, one of my Gold members. He says, "I got to say, I really find Access difficult to make it do what I want it to do. Can you offer any advice on how to get over the hump, so to speak, and be comfortable and successful with Access?" Yeah, I get this one a lot, Benjamin. Of course, the old adage is true, practice makes perfect. It's just something you just got to kind of do, do a lot. I've been doing this for 30 years; it's how I make it look easy. But I'll be honest, I came from a traditional programming background with BASIC and C and that kind of stuff.

And so, reconfiguring your brain to work with a database and thinking in SQL and stuff like that, that took me a while. In fact, the first couple of projects that I had from customers where they wanted me to build an airplane out of toothpicks. But once I discovered database programs like Access and how much easier it made things, I fell in love with it.

My number one suggestion for people, and I mentioned this several times in my beginner courses, is don't try to do work-related stuff in Access while you're learning it. Pick a different project, a hobby that you have, something that you like doing, something personal. It will help to wire your brain that Access is pleasurable and you'll look forward to working with it, and that's how you learn stuff. And then you start thinking, "Oh, maybe I could do this. How about if I tried that," that kind of stuff.

For me, when I first started learning this, I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. So I made a database to store all my characters and do a character generator and a dice roller and stuff like that. And that's just helped me to learn it. And another piece of advice is watch my lessons multiple times. Sometimes you don't get it the first time through. You're watching it and you're like, "Huh?" But then after that, try to play with it on your own. Go through the examples that I do and then watch it a second time. And it'll make more sense the second time through. That's the beauty of video learning. It's not like you're going to sit in a classroom where once the class is done, that's it. You've got notes to look over, and that's it.

My videos, you can watch them as many times as you want. So watch them a second time, maybe even a third time, and then that light bulb will start to turn on. But don't try to build your work project while you're still in the beginner lessons. Wait until you get at least a couple of lessons into the expert series because then you start learning more about relationships and combo boxes and subforms and things that really make your database work well. And even with a little bit of VBA programming in there, then it starts to really make it starts to gel. So just give it some time. Give it some practice. And you'll get there. Don't worry.

Got a bunch of comments on my repost of my Daylight Saving Time is Dumb video. And yes, I'm going to keep reposting this twice a year until it goes away. A few people said they like the extra daylight in the summer but they think it should be year-round. Yeah, that's fine with me. I don't care. They can jump it ahead six hours, twelve hours if they want. Keep whatever you want. I don't care. Just don't change the clocks. Keep whatever time you want. Don't change the clock. I don't care if everyone went on universal time. And you just got to learn locally what your noon is and what time to get up, and everybody's on the same clock then.

A few people said that in the northern latitudes it makes sense because, you know, you get days in December when the sun doesn't come out till 9 10 o'clock in the morning and I kind of get that daylight saving does make some sense if you're in those higher latitudes, okay, but down here in Florida, there's not a whole lot of difference between summer and winter. The closer you get to the equator, the closer it is to 12 hours of sunlight every day. So, the southern states, especially Florida. Arizona doesn't use it, so come on. You want to keep it up in Seattle or up in Maine, fine, but down here, we don't need it, we don't want it.

And this guy said, if I ran for president, this is the only issue I run on, then I've got his vote. Thanks. I would take the job, and I could fix things, but my viewpoints aren't always popular. I tend to go with the science when it comes to pretty much all things in life. I follow the science. And is science perfect? No, but science is better than guesswork or gut feelings or because that's how we've always done it. So not everyone likes that approach. I'm a science nerd. So that's, you know, live long and prosper, people. What would Mr. Spock do? That's what I would do.

This one is a follow-up to my Edge browser control series. And this guy's basically saying that for sites like ChatGPT that require a logon, once you click the logon button on their site, it then opens up in the outside browser. And you'll get that, especially if they have a subdomain, right, or they direct you to a different domain altogether, like some places do. There's nothing you can do about that with the Edge browser control. It's a limitation I've run into myself. So I don't know of any techniques to get around that, even adding it to your safe list, but maybe in the future that's something they'll fix. The Edge browser control is still in its infancy and I'm sure it's going to be updated and fixed and worked on, and when they come out with more stuff for it and changes, well, I'll let you know.

I'm not usually the first one to get this kind of like new stuff. You know, the guys over at Access Forever or Mike Wolf over at No Long Set, those guys tend to get the news and the updates. I get my news from them half the time. So when something's new, I usually wait a little while before I start making lessons on it because the one thing I hate is to, you know, something new is out and then I make a lesson on it and then, oh, they changed it already, or, oh, it's got all kinds of bugs, and so I just wasted a bunch of time. So I wait for something's been out for a little while before I... that's why I really haven't done any lessons on like Dataverse and Power Platform. Yes, I know that stuff's been out forever, but I'm not one to jump on new technology.

Helicopter Services Guy says my subforms add new button appears disabled. Any help on how to enable it? Okay, this sounds like a not updatable issue. Alright, go to this page right here, watch that video. You've done something to the record source of your subform to make it so it's not updatable. Open up the subform by itself and if you still can't edit or add records, then it's not updatable. Watch that video for why. Chances are that that form is based on a query that is now too complex. You got something going on there, a join or some kind of weird stuff that has made it not updatable. That's why it's generally best to make your forms bound to tables or to queries that only have calculations in them. I don't like queries with joins unless they're real simple joins, like you're joining to get a customer name or something like that. I've seen people try to make forms with twenty joins. No, no, don't do that; it's too complicated.

This one is a response to my unrecognized database format video. Savior says, "The disabled file server leasing is for advanced users to prevent corruption on computers that are backed and restored." Yes, this is one of the topics of Keith's. So in that video, I mentioned that I think it was Daniel over at DevHut or Mike Wolf, one of those guys, they posted an article that they talk about this thing called server leasing. Yeah, it was DevHut, of course. He's got a lot of great stuff on his site. And they've got a thing where you can disable the leasing on the file server. It's basically a way that the server machine, right, even if it's just a Windows machine, it doesn't have to be a server, handles the data in and out. And there's a registry hack you can use to disable the leasing, it's called, which will make the server PC handle that data better. But again, it appears that this issue's been fixed in the latest versions of Access, so you might not need this. But again, I didn't want to go over this whole thing in my video, but I included a link in the original video. I'll put a link down below as well if you want to go read this article. It's pretty good. So if you're still having this problem, then you might need this fix.

Mail Junk 8834 asks if there were any subsequent videos on my Easy Access POS. No, this is something I actually started several years ago, a little while back. I started doing it in one of my Access Developer classes, level 13 or 14, I think, one of those. And my goal was I was going to, over the next several lessons in my developer series, build a POS system. And so I did the first one, which is all the database setup and setting up your tables and all that, which in and of itself is good. But I didn't actually take it beyond that step with actually building the whole thing, mostly because the feedback from my students was, "Yeah, this is interesting and stuff, but we just don't need it." So at the time, I thought, well, I'll make a separate seminar out of it or a template or something, but there really wasn't a lot of interest for it, so I didn't continue making the POS.

So if you are interested in seeing a POS built in Access, let me know, post a comment down below, and if enough of you are interested, then I'll consider building it, either as a TechHelp series or as a standalone seminar or template depending on the interest. I try to give the squeaky wheels the grease. So the more it's like the TechHelp videos, the more I see a particular question, the more likely I am to make a video on it.

Mac Fibo asks, "His database is on a tablet and when he touches a form field and the on-screen keyboard pops up, it moves things around. Right? Access, okay, so I'm going to guess by your username, you're using a Mac. I'm not sure, or your name is Mac, one of the two. But if you're using either a Mac or Android, then you're definitely connecting into Access using some kind of like a remote desktop solution. And so it's definitely not going to be aware of that. If you're using a Windows tablet, Access still isn't aware of when the on-screen keyboard pops up. I don't know of any way to have Access know that that's happening. If you guys have any ideas, let me know.

The only thing I would recommend is to design a form in your database specifically for your tablet that gives enough space on the bottom of the screen for that on-screen keyboard. And yeah, it's going to be dead space in the meantime, but figure with a database, you're probably going to have your keyboard up most of the time anyway. So I don't know of any way to make Access aware of the on-screen keyboard. So unless you did something where with a got focus event for each field, you could slide the form up that far. But I don't know. I would really have to play with this to tell you for sure.

This one came in on the customer service forum on my website. Steven says, "I, like many, don't have the money for Microsoft Office, which includes Access. Any chance you could start a video series on Libre Office Base, or Open Office Base, which is pretty much the same thing? Libre Office Base is a great starting point for those considering a free alternative to Microsoft Access."

You make a good point that there is a lot of good software out there that's free that does a lot of the same stuff that Microsoft Office does, especially your word processor and your spreadsheet programs. I'll admit even I use Google Docs and Google Sheets once in a while instead of Word and Excel. As far as Access goes, I would be surprised if these products have the power and the flexibility that Access has, but I'll be completely honest I've never used either of these, and I really haven't seen any demand. Yours is probably the first email I've gotten in probably ten years asking for either of these pieces of software, and they might be great, and they might do a lot of what Access does, but there's just no demand for them as far as I'm concerned.

And to be completely honest while I love making videos and I wish I didn't have to charge for them, I do have a business around this. This is what I do full-time, and I've got puppies to feed. So I don't think that someone who will not pay ten dollars a month for Microsoft Office is going to buy my tutorials for free software, so I don't think it lines up with my business model. Besides, Access and Microsoft Office, that's what I do; that's what I've always done, and I've been using them for thirty years, and I have no desire to change. But feel free to prove me wrong. If there are a lot of you out there who are interested in learning about these two different office suites, post a comment below and let me know what you think. Or even with the Google stuff, I did think I have been thinking about doing some lessons on Google Docs and Google Sheets, but I do use those myself and they do have some benefits. But as far as the other products, sorry, it's just not on my radar and wish I could make enough money on just putting videos on YouTube, but I know a lot of people do, especially people that make stupid cat videos. A lot of influencers out there. But for what I do, I have to sell memberships, and I have to have courses to sell on the back end. Otherwise, just the revenue that I get from YouTube is not enough to survive on, especially with Microsoft Access being my specialty. I love all of you, but I got to turn a few of you into members to make it worthwhile.

This is a response to my bookmarks video, and this person, GazOnIce, says, "You can also right-click on that margin, that indicator bar, and then go toggle and then bookmark." And that's awesome. I didn't know that. So if in your database you go to your VB editor and you want to put a bookmark here, right click, toggle, bookmark. I love it. I love when you guys teach me things. There's so many things in the interface that even I didn't know that my students have taught me over the years. Because, you know how it is, when you learn something one way and you get fixed in that, you don't remember any other way to do it. So I've got my one way that I use, the very rarely that I ever use a bookmark, and that's the only way that I remember. So as with everything, I'm not surprised that there's at least three or four ways to do everything in Access, so thanks for the tip.

But folks, that's going to do it for this week. There's your quick queries for today. I hope you learned something. Live long and prosper, my friends. I'll see you next time.