There are many things a user does with an application that need to be preserved either during processing, between screens, between sessions, or between application updates/versions. When designing a system, it’s important to consider what needs to be kept and where/how to do this. If designed properly, the data should also support multi-user environments.
Problem
Users are commonly annoyed to be forced to re-enter their last specifications when the application should start with that as its default. After all, a computer is supposed to be good at remembering things, right?
Solutions
There are several ways to preserve user information during a session, on a PC, and/or between PCs:
Keeping Selections in Memory for the Current Session
Using the Registry to Store User Information Between Sessions
Using Private Tables to Store Information Between Sessions
Microsoft Access combo boxes let you display data for users to select values from predefined lists. Using them effectively simplifies data entry and accuracy.
Brush up on the ComboBox Basics from Microsoft, and check out our Top Five Tips for using Combo Boxes on Microsoft Access forms. Each of them has articles describing them in more detail.
To use combo boxes effectively, learn about the following properties:
* LimitToList: Set this property to Yes to prevent values that are not in your list. * AutoExpand: Set this property to Yes to automatically select a matching value in the list as you type. * ListRows: Set this value to a high value so that the drop down shows as many list items as space allows.
Use the following syntax to automatically select the first item in a ComboBox when the form loads, or when the value of another control on the form changes:
On a form with multiple ComboBoxes, you may want to make the selection in one ComboBox limit the choices in another ComboBox. To do this, add code to the “AfterUpdate” event of the first control that updates the RowSource property of the second control.
Microsoft’s SkyDrive service has offered everyone a free 25GB hard disk in the cloud. This lets you store your files, backups, and even share files with others. It’s an amazing free offer that we’ve mentioned in the past.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has just reduced the free amount to 7 GB. That’s still generous, is more than Apple’s iCloud, and is what’s offered to new customers. For a limited time, any registered SkyDrive user *who has uploaded files to SkyDrive* as of April 22nd can opt in to keep 25GB of free storage while still getting all of the benefits of the new service.
So, if you already have a SkyDrive account, they are letting you keep your 25GB disk but you need to claim it.
Simply log into your SkyDrive account at skydrive.com with your Microsoft’s Windows Live credentials. On the bottom left of your account page, and click on the “Manage Storage” link. You’ll see a listing of storage plans, and under “SkyDrive Free” a button that says “Free upgrade!”
Not familiar with SkyDrive? In addition to being a hard disk in the sky, SkyDrive also has software you can install on your device (PC, Mac, mobile) and keep folders in sync. Here’s an overview of the new features from CBS Moneywatch: Microsoft gets cloud storage right with new SkyDrive
In Microsoft Access, a common need is to have multiple combo boxes or list boxes on a form, and to have the selection in one combo box limit the choices in a second combo box or listbox. For example, consider an Address form containing State and City lookups. When you select a state, you want the list of cities list to be limited the selected state.
This is known as cascading combo boxes or synchronized combo boxes.
We recently posted a tip and demo database containing a sample of species, both plants and animals, categorized by their taxonomic rank (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, and genus). When you select the value “Animal” from the Kingdom combo box, the Phylum combo box is updated to only show Animal phylum. The Species list box is also filtered by your selection.
The site is the world's largest collection of public case studies for entrepreneurial women. It is a community where women can learn from the experiences of other women addressing their businesses, family and personal challenges.
The revamped website is built on Visual Studio .NET, SQL Server with a modern, dynamic interface incorporating our technical and graphic artist resources.
Contact us if we can help you with a similar solution.
Yesterday, FMS President Luke Chung was invited by the governor’s office to participate in his proclamation of 2012 as the Year of the Entrepreneur. Luke stood behind Governor Bob McDonnell and Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling during the press conference and participated in a day-long event supporting entrepreneurship, small businesses, and job creation.
Commerce Secretary James Cheng led the events. Participants were able to hear from successful Virginia business founders and learn from each other through a luncheon and Entrepreneurial Town Hall. Examples of agricultural, technology, manufacturing, and craft businesses showed the diversity of Virginia firms offering products and services for in-state, national and international customers. It was also interesting to trace the roots of the founding of Virginia in 1607 as a high-risk entrepreneurial enterprise that eventually led to success after many failures.
All parties recognized the value and responsibility of seasoned entrepreneurs helping newer entrepreneurs, and how fundamental this was to the success of our state and nation. Activities will occur around the commonwealth over the year where government representatives and entrepreneurs share their ideas, experiences, and resources. Already recognized as one of the most business friendly states in the country with one of the lowest unemployment rates, Virginia continues to foster business success in a bipartisan manner.
Noteworthy was the inclusion of Education Secretary Laura Fornash in the activities stressing the importance of public education as part of a healthy business climate. This includes having great K-12 education and the many higher education institutions across Virginia. Those institutions attract bright students from outside Virginia, create entrepreneurial opportunities around them, and give us the ability to keep them in Virginia for life. FMS and Luke Chung are honored to be a part of this initiative.
LinkedIn offers many opportunities for professionals to interact with each other. There are many groups available for the Microsoft Access, Azure, SQL Server, and Visual Studio .NET communities. Here are some of the vibrant groups we’ve discovered:
Data normalization is fundamental to database design. Properly normalized data makes it easy to support an application over time and simplifies the querying, displaying, and reporting features of an application.
Unfortunately, we don’t always receive or have normalized data. Tables that require adding fields as the data changes over time are particularly problematic and violate the basic premise of database design where adding records is free, but adding fields is expensive:
Here are some updated resources detailing the value of data normalization, including a sample database and VBA code to transpose and normalize your existing data.
We at FMS have always been passionate about education and have provided a wide range of software solutions for the education community at all levels. Over the past several years, I’ve served on a Business and Community Advisory Board to the Superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools. The public schools in Fairfax County are among the best in the nation with 180,000 students, making it larger than 12 states (by student population). I currently serve as the school board representative on the county’s Information Technology Policy Advisory Committee (ITPAC) to the Board of Supervisors where we review major technology projects for the county.
Tying teacher performance to student achievement
At the beginning of the school year, I was appointed by the superintendent to participate in the county’s Teachers Performance Evaluation Task Force. I’m one of two outsiders on this committee of 35, which includes some of the best teachers, principals and administrators across the county. To meet the waiver requirements of the Federal No Child Left Behind statute, the State of Virginia is requiring teacher performance to be tied to student performance. The state department of education is recommending a 40% weighting. They are not defining on what to base student performance, but state standardized test scores immediately come to mind.
As an outsider who has never been evaluated as a teacher, you can imagine my surprise to discover that while principals were judged by their school’s student performance, student performance is not part of a teacher’s performance evaluation in our county (and probably state). 0%Are you kidding me?
I’ve learned that there’s a lot of angst around this. We all recognize that not all students are equal, and we don’t want to have a system where teachers are evaluated solely on student performance because the incentive would be to only want to teach good students. Good students may perform well in spite of bad teaching, so raw scores are not a good indicator of performance. The fairest testing evaluation system seems to be the concept of “value added” measurements. That is, as a teacher, you’d have students coming in at a certain percentile, and leaving at another percentile at the end of the year. If your students move up, you’ve added value; if they’ve moved down, they would have done better with an average teacher. Sounds good in concept, but this has practical problems such as kids moving in and out of classes within the year, impacts on kids outside teacher control, whether the test is a good measurement, multiple teacher collaborative environments, etc.
That said, 0% is still not acceptable. Nor is scrapping the whole concept based on a few outliers or issues. Especially compared to the current evaluation system where a principal or administrator sits in a classroom for less than an hour each quarter, and huge challenges removing under-performing teachers who don’t improve with training.
What have I learned?
I have been very impressed by individuals on the committee who get it. They understand that it’s in their best interest and that of their profession to set high standards and meet them. Failure to do so not only harms students but undermines political and taxpayer support for public education. Change is coming from the federal level down, and taking a leadership role has long-term benefits.
In our fast-changing software world, we need people to constantly gain new skills and improve their productivity. Performance with old technology last year may not be relevant this year. We can’t rewind each year and evaluate people on skills, client relationships, projects, etc. since so much changes each year. However, in education, the inputs each year are essentially the same (it’d be nice if student performance continually improved but that’s not changing significantly).
In spite of all the shortcomings, there are actually lots of objective measurements available to judge teacher performance. Almost all academic courses have existing pre-tests and post-tests for classes, and of course there are standardized tests. Those opposed to tying teacher performance to student achievement tend to be the ones least interested in providing any measurements for doing so. Propose alternatives if the existing ones are not acceptable. We can’t treat teaching like an art that can’t be measured.
As I pondered the issues around teacher performance, it always boiled down to philosophical issues. What does it mean to be a good teacher? Average class performance? Performance of the best kids? Raising the weakest kid? What if you can’t get a kid to engage and be interested? Whose fault is that? We’ve always known there are great teachers who many people love yet others passionately hate. Who’s best to judge, the students, administrators, peers, parents? Everything has shortcomings.
Who benefits and pays the most for good or bad teaching?
Over the holidays, I started thinking of teaching in a totally new way by considering: Who benefits and pays the most for good or bad teaching?
Well, the students do of course, but no one is eager to have students evaluate teacher performance directly due to the many conflicts of interest.
Parents? They certainly have a stake but being a parent myself and being around other parents, I would hardly consider parents qualified to really know what’s going on with individual classes — they should stay focused on evaluating their own children.
Bureaucrats? Whether at the federal, state, or county level, I think they’re hard pressed to come up with specifics for evaluating a particular teacher. They can design what should be taught and offer resources and training, but evaluations taking into account each school and class’s unique situation is too detailed to do with broad requirements.
An alternative paradigm: ‘Teachers are the Customer’
I’ve now come up with a whole new way to look at teaching. Essentially, a teacher receives kids from upstream, trains them, and then passes them off to their next downstream teacher. Looking at it more like a production line, the teacher is a huge beneficiary and victim of good and bad teaching, more than anyone else in the system other than the student. Teachers should be empowered to define expectations and evaluate their upstream teachers for their performance. Done properly, this creates a positive feedback loop and automatically addresses any unique issues within a school. After all, doesn’t every teacher want to grow and deliver the best batch of students to their colleagues? Looking at it from this perspective, the teachers I discussed this with all knew exactly which teachers upstream from them they thought were good or bad overall and for different types of student personalities. In fact, several said there were teachers they would want or avoid sending their kids to. Wow, wouldn’t it be great to include the input of downstream teachers in a teacher’s evaluation? Isn’t that an important person each teacher is serving? I felt I made a mental breakthrough.
Feedback from the administrators
So I introduced this to the Teacher Performance Task Force last week. And while they appreciated my new perspective, I didn’t receive an immediate endorsement. They raised some issues such as teachers were not trained to do this, and how new teachers could properly evaluate more experienced teachers. I took their feedback under consideration.
At last night’s meeting, I mentioned my idea to the superintendent. He liked my approach and asked how it was received within the task force. It then occurred to me that the feedback there was not acceptable. The concept that more junior downstream teachers would evaluate more senior upstream teachers may be too foreign and frightening for some to accept, but that’s a resource which should be utilized. Training to do it properly is just training. You have to serve your customer. I’m not saying a teacher’s entire performance is based on that or that experience isn’t a factor (it is), but the next teacher plays a unique and important role in evaluating performance.
What’s next?
Overall, I appreciate the committee welcoming and encouraging my feedback and treating me as an equal, given my never having been a teacher. We all share a goal of improving public K-12 education with a fair teacher evaluation system, and I recognize I’m naive about these actual evaluation processes. They’ve asked for my out-of-the box thinking and applying best practices from outside the education community. That’s how I reached my teacher focused paradigm. Teachers have the most at stake with creating an evaluation system that at the very least, identifies and removes poor performers that training fails to improve. Teachers are very concerned with the new evaluation system, so empowering them in the process should be positively received. In the end, teachers pay the highest price if improvement doesn’t occur. First in their day-to-day classroom efforts dealing with under-prepared students, and longer term their professional reputation and taxpayer support. Removing under-performing teachers, doesn’t even reduce headcount. It gives an opportunity to someone who is eager to teach in the school system and has above average promise (if not, that’s a recruiting problem). Beyond that, the evaluation system should focus on professional development to help teachers identify areas of improvement. There will probably be a different process for evaluating rookie teachers who are expected to gain skills initially versus more experienced teachers who should already have those skills and falling back to “rookie” level would not be considered acceptable.
We have a few more meetings before the task force needs to finish and make its recommendations. They are hoping to put the new system in place for next school year. Wish me luck.
Read our new paper on:
Microsoft Access combo boxes let you display data for users to select values from predefined lists. Using them effectively simplifies data entry and accuracy.
Microsoft’s SkyDrive service has offered everyone a free 25GB hard disk in the cloud. This lets you store your files, backups, and even share files with others. It’s an amazing free offer that we’ve mentioned in the past.
For a more detailed description and video of how it’s used, see Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky explain the exciting new features and vision:
Microsoft Azure and SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server
