DHES

While taking care of my grandmother down in Oklahoma, and scanning the primetime television channels, I came across a local business called "Bargain World." How it goes, is they show you ten items, live, on television, then they go to a board (actually a computer linked to the broadcasting equipment) that lists the item; and the bid.

You call in and get a "Bidder Number," (a one-time thing) which allows you to place bids on an item. When the phone calls die down, they will say "Y'all through out there?", and then they will count down, until "Table Sold." After narrowing down the possibilities, I finally called them and inquired about what they are using. The person I talked to was not very computer-savvy, (I can tell), but did mention Microsoft Access. Also, me being from the north, their accent didn't help either.

They changed the title bar to "The Auctioneer," which confused me at first, but using Microsoft Access before (Just to experiment) I realized that that could be done.

Another clue that will help me figure this is that the title bar was
The Auctioneer - [ShowTable:Form]


Anywho, to sum this all up, is there anybody that could give me some guidance on how to create something like this? I Google'd it, but to no avail.

David

MS Access is designed so you can make it completely transparent and appear like a stand-alone application. These options are done via "Tools - Startup", and various other methods such as creating custom menus and toolbars which is achievable in any MS Office application.

The data for the system is likely located on their remote server, possibly a simple web server and the client access database just links into that via ODBC or something, I have not experimented with remote data connections before so cannot offer any info on this.

The rest of the application is likely handled by simple access forms and macro builder etc, but they may also make use of the built in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) which exists in every MS Office application. This is a version of the VB programming language which can run within MS Office apps. For any complex tasks they likely make use of VBA.

Thank you for the advice, I am going to mess around and see what I can get working.