Years ago, back in March of 1982 when I first became a member of the Sacramento PC Users Group; I was just a member and did not know much about how the User Group was ran. A few months later, I gave a demonstration on one of my Printers, a Diablo 630 with a Cut-Sheet Feeder. I supposedly did a good job and was asked to help run the group by maintaining the records of the group and help write a membership database program using dBase II. I accepted the job as well as Treasurer and Vice-President. I was not really a dBase programmer but soon I was learning the commands and writing code easily. The Treasurer position did not last very long, but the position of Membership Director took eight years of my life and during that time, I developed that program to include all the needs of the group's membership.
I took the position well in heart and soon helped the User Group have its own Class 2 Mailing Permit. Early on, I had a friend that owned a Forms company and he sold the group self mailing forms and I created a renewal form for our membership within the dBase program. I then created a Membership Card so we could send out own cards out. After 1990, I had several other things going on that I decided it was time to give up the task and let someone else do it. Ever since then, it has still been used to maintain the database of the Users Group until now. The only other person that has made any changes to the database has been Tom Anderson who made some minor modifications to the program to include more fields and support Y2K needs.
It is about time we convert this data over to a Windows application and we have been talking about it for quite a while. Well I decided that why should we re-invent the wheel when all I have to do is ask another User Group to get their Access Database program and just modify it to fit our needs. I went off to Comdex this year and did just that. I found only one group that was willing to do this. It was the Greater Cleveland PC Users Group and the contact person was Jim Evans who is also a Director of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG). I waited and did not hear anymore about the request until I emailed him again. He wrote back and gave us some bad news.
First he stated that his board must vote on giving us their program. Second he stated that the program has plenty of quirks and bugs about it and needed to be cleaned up. It also has a security feature to it asking for a password each and every time you access the data and they do not know how to remove this feature and if they gave us the program, we would have to know the password. After that, they stated that the program is actually two databases. One database holds the code, forms, reports and queries and links to the other database which holds the actual data.
Well with all this I decided that I put back on my programming Hat and start from scratch and create a new database for the Membership. So I sat down today and started writing it from Scratch. Well, all I can say is that it has been a long time since I worked with Access but it is coming along well. I have created Databases, Queries, Forms and reports to do Renewal Forms, Membership Cards, and maintain information to hold all the information the Users Group needs. I am sure I will have to have help with someone else on some of the features but it will soon be in place and we can throw away that old program for good. I wish Larry Clark was still around to help. He was the only real true Access programmer that I trusted. Maybe I'll have him look at it when I am done and he can add some pointers for the group.
I'll keep you informed on how it goes and when we actually have it in place.
