Sales Tracking, Variables, Arrays, Receipts

Welcome to Access Beginner 202. In this course you will learn how to build a hot dog stand application that tracks sales of hot dogs, French fries, and soft drinks, calculates prices including extended totals and sales tax, and appends order information to a text file for later analysis in Excel or Access. We will discuss printing formatted receipts, introduce concepts such as variables, user-defined types, arrays, modules, Sub Main, public subroutines, and constants, and review prerequisites and resources to help you follow along with the lessons.

Lessons

•  00. Introduction (2:32)
•  01. Hot Dog Stand (8:08)
•  02. Hot Dog Stand 2 (12:03)
•  03. Hot Dog Stand 3 (15:03)
•  04. More Variables 1 (13:07)
•  05. More Variables 2 (13:00)
•  06. Math & Strings (23:01)
•  07. Review & What's Next (3:19)
• Total Runtime: 1 hour 30 minutes

Resources

• Full Course Outline
•  Video ZIP File (34 MB)
•  PDF Handbook
• Certificate of Completion
• Post-Class Survey

Lesson Summary

Welcome! Hot Dog Stand App: Sales & Logs - In this lesson, we begin our introduction to Visual Basic by outlining how to create a hot dog stand application that tracks sales of hot dogs, French fries, and soft drinks, calculates extended prices, sales tax, and order totals, and appends sales information to a text file for analysis in Excel or Access. We will discuss how to print and format receipts, and introduce concepts like variables, user-defined types, arrays, modules, Sub Main, public subroutines, and constants. Prerequisites and class resources are also explained, along with recommendations for how to follow along with the material.

Lesson 1: Track Sales with Spinners & Scrolls - In Lesson 1, we will start building a hot dog stand application to track sales of hot dogs, french fries, and soft drinks. We will walk through setting up the form with text boxes and labels for each item, initializing their values, and adding vertical scroll bar controls as spinner buttons for easier input. I will show you how to configure these scroll bars, lock the text boxes to prevent manual changes, and write the code needed to increment or decrement the item counts while preventing negative values. This foundational setup prepares us for further development of the hot dog stand tracking system.

Lesson 2: Subtotals, Tax & Currency Formatting - In Lesson 2 of the Hot Dog Stand 2 tutorial, we will set up the events necessary to perform the calculations for our hot dog stand form, including calculating sales tax and the order total. We will walk through setting up text boxes for item prices, locking fields to prevent unwanted changes, and creating a subroutine to handle the pricing calculations. I will show you how to use the format currency function to properly display amounts, as well as how to organize and name your controls for clarity and consistency before discussing how to eventually log completed orders.

Lesson 3: Save Orders, Print Receipts, Import Data - In this lesson, we will walk through creating a log file to save all hot dog stand orders, including setting up buttons to clear and save order data, and ensuring values do not go below zero. I will show you how to open a text file in append mode, format each line with item counts, prices, subtotals, sales tax, order total, and a timestamp, and then how to view and import this hot dog stand log into Microsoft Excel for bookkeeping. Finally, we will discuss generating and printing a formatted customer receipt in Notepad.

Lesson 4: Variables, UDTs, Strings, Arrays - In this lesson, we will work more with variables by looking at a complete list of Visual Basic variable types, including some not previously covered like byte, boolean, object, and variant. We will discuss user-defined types, allowing you to group related information, for example, into a customer variable. I will show you how to create fixed-length strings, which are useful for working with file records, and how to build arrays of both standard and custom data types. Throughout, we will walk through practical examples so you can see how more variables can be used in your programs.

Lesson 5: Vars, Modules, Static, Const, Main - In this lesson, we are working with more variables and will discuss the differences between private and public variables, including how to create public variables and subroutines in modules so multiple forms can use them. We will walk through adding modules to a project, using public subs, and setting up a Sub Main to initialize values and control program startup. We will also talk about static variables and constants, showing how to declare and use values that remain unchanged or maintain their state throughout the program.

Lesson 6: Integer Division, Modulus, Strings, Dates - In this lesson, we are going to cover several misc topics including integer division, modulus (finding division remainders), exponentiation, string manipulation such as uppercase, lowercase, and proper case conversion, as well as string functions like left, right, mid, trim, and replace. We will also discuss how to format numbers, currency, percentages, and dates using the various format functions, including custom date/time formatting. Additionally, we will talk about useful date functions like DateAdd and DateDiff, and see some practical examples for each of these concepts.

Lesson 7: Variables, Arrays, Files, Sales - In this course we learned how to build a hot dog stand application, track sales of items like dogs, fries, and drinks, calculate sales tax and order totals, append order history to a text file, and import that data into Excel for daily sales calculations. We also discussed printing receipts by creating text files, and covered Visual Basic concepts such as variables, user defined types, arrays, modules, Sub Main, public subroutines, constants, date formatting, string functions, and integer division. Information about next steps, questions, feedback, and staying updated through the website was also provided.

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