Arguments for an Access 2007 macro
It's only a small improvement but I was very pleased when I realised what had been added
to the macro designer in Access 2007. In previous versions - like the Access XP
screenshot opposite - you've only been able to see the details of one row in the
macro at a time.
In the example the designer is on the first action in the macro and can see from the
bottom pane that this OpenForm action opens the
ClubEntry form in a normal window in Edit mode. The only
way to find out what the second OpenForm does is to
scroll down three rows and look at the Action Arguments for that line. By doing that
of course you lose sight of the details of the first line and so comparing the details
of two actions in a macro becomes a long job. The Comments column can be a help but
my usual problem is that I want to compare the syntax of the two lines to discover why
one is working but the other is failing.
The Macro Designer in Access 2007 helps with this problem because an optional new column
has been added to design grid in the top half of the designer. The Arguments column in
the screen shot on the left shows the arguments for each macro action as a comma-
separated list.
This means that I can see the arguments being passed to both
OpenForm actions at once, I can see that the first is
opening the Club form and the second is opening the Members form and I can see that
(apart from the name of the form itself) the two actions seem to have the same arguments
so they both ought to be working. As a bonus, I can also see what the two
RunCode actions are doing. The
StopMacro action takes no arguments so the column is empty
for that row.
You can't see the exact meaning of these arguments in the comma-separated list but you can
always look down at the Action Arguments area if you need that much detail. You have to
use the Action Arguments area when you are adding or editting the action. The Arguments
column in the grid is read-only.
The Arguments column is only a small change but I find that being able to see the details
of all the actions at once really does help me to understand what a macro is doing. If
the Arguments column isn't visible in the grid, click the
button in the Design section of the ribbon.
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