So thus far, I have been working at this plant for more than a year now and I was hired to build access programs. The corporate office really does limit this plants capabilities when it comes to trying to automate things so they brought me in with my IT and access background. The first project I started, completed, and implemented has been used for about a year now and with the holidays, my colleagues are not always around for me to question about current projects. I pulled that first project out, grew disgusted, and decided it was garbage. I want to make the next version bigger and better. The program is basically a form with the layout of certain machines within our plant. The user can turn machines on and off with just a click and with a selection, change shift groups. Its current end goal is to provide a user interface for the machines and produce a report for the groups and project the coming weeks output/goals. Below is just a sample of my layout. I have over 100 machines. In the sample, 1001-1003 and 2101-2104 are group 1 (in blue) and group 2 is 2124-2123 (in red or whatever that is).
It might be far fetched but I would like to incorporate a different form/screen and design it in a way that the user can modify the layout easily (IE move machines, delete machines, add machines). Currently, I have a table that when the layout is opened, a recordset is created and looped to find groups and changes the rectangles color appropriately according to a color scheme. Would creating an object and assigning it the attributes from the table work? Each machine would be it's own object. Also, all the machines within this portion of the plant are not the same type; most are of the same size but others can take up the size of two smaller ones. I was thinking about setting up a grid type system, display a table that kept that information and allow the user to make changes but the sizes of the machines are not the same. I'm stuck in a non creative box and any thoughts or ideas would be magnificent.