Maximum form height of 22 inches on high resolution monitors

[Miles R]

Not as issue for me at the moment, but might be for people considering high resolution monitors - e.g. 4K



Unless I am mistaken, Access works on the basis of 96 DPI, so for images to be shown actual size, the monitor would also need to be 96 DPI.
So, if you have a large form (say 20 inches in height) on which you want to place images in actual size using positioning in VBA, that is OK on a smaller resolution monitor (with suitable scaling to get the images to show actual size based on the real DPI of the monitor).
Now, let us say you move to a high resolution monitor (for convenience say 192 DPI), the images will be half actual size. To get them to show real size again, you need to apply a scaling factor of 2 to all measurements (whether TWIPS or inches).
So the form is now 40 inches in height, which will cause the program to crash as it exceeds the 22 inch limit for forms.

It seems to me that on a 4k monitor (without any Windows scaling applied), the height of any form in real terms will be limited to about 11 inches, so the idea of scrolling down a page would be meaningless.
Surely this is going to be a real problem when 4k monitors become the norm, unless Access is changed to allow a much larger form size, or Access is modified to work at a default higher DPI.

I know people will say you should use tabbed forms and not scroll long pages, but sometimes having a large form that you can scroll down is exactly what you want. I have that on one of my applications for personal use that has a large number of items shown actual size on a long form. Scrolling up and down is much simpler than having the complication of splitting the items in several tabs.

If any of the information I have included here is incorrect, no doubt someone will correct me. May be there are options in access that I don't know about yet.

[Minty]

I stopped using a 4k monitor with Access about 2 years ago, not only was it difficult to read, but Access didn't handle it very well at all.
It would suffer from weird artefacts, when working with multiple monitors it was clunky as it didn't resolve the resolutions very well if they were different.

Trying to grab a 1pt border on any form design items was nigh on impossible.
So I ended up scaling the resolution back to normal HD, which was rather a waste of my £450 monitor.

It's currently in the garage gathering dust, and I have 3 x 24" HD monitors instead on a nice desk mount, both at home and in the office.

[Miles R]

Minty, thanks for your reply.

Yes I recently upgraded my monitor. I had a 19" 5:4 monitor at 1280:1024 (had this for 18 years). Using Access 2007 my application worked very well.
I wanted a wider monitor, so bought a 24" 16:9 monitor at 2560:1440. I soon discovered that Access 2007 could not handle the scaling very well and gave fuzzy text, so I upgraded to Office 365. Text is good.
However, due to the small text size even at 125 scaling, I decided to abandon it and now have a 24" 16:10 monitor at 1920:1200, which is fantastic and I think 16:10 is better for photo and office work, not for gaming. The 16:9 monitor is now in the attic gathering dust.

It was only later when amending one of my Access programs for the wider monitor that I discovered the 22" page length problem. Even at a slightly higher DPI (94 vs 87), the program crashed due to exceeding the 22" limit. I can get round this because of the extra width, so I won't need so much form height when more images are shown across the screen. Had I stuck with the 1440 monitor, I would probably have to redesign the form with tabs.

So glad I made the decision to scrap the 1440.

[isladogs]

Consider using automatic form resizing (AFR)
It will allow forms & their contents to scale up without loss of clarity.

See my 3-part tutorial on AFR: https://www.isladogs.co.uk/automatic-form-resizing-1/

However, AFR cannot overcome the issue with the maximum width & maximum section heights as those are measured in twips using an integer datatype
1440 twips = 1 inch. The integer limit is 32767. 32767 / 1440 = 22.75 inches approx.

[Miles R]

Thanks for your reply. Don't really need to consider AFR as the program is for my own use on one monitor, that I'll probably have for the next 10 - 20 years.
I have my own scaling in the program to make sure images that I want to be shown actual size are shown actual size.
All other parts of the program seem to work well on the new monitor without any adjustment.

The real issue for me was the 22 inch form size. Can't believe that Microsoft couldn't just use a Long for this - have they not got round to this yet?
I think it will be a problem when more people start using 4k or even higher resolution monitors as standard.

Another Y2K bug in the making (joke!) and I was involved in fixing the last one.

[isladogs]

You might still find the optional zoom feature supplied with my AFR code useful even though its just for your own monitor
Here's a very simple example in case you are interested:

The real issue for me was the 22 inch form size. Can't believe that Microsoft couldn't just use a Long for this - have they not got round to this yet?
I think it will be a problem when more people start using 4k or even higher resolution monitors as standard.

There is no indication that MS is going to change the integer datatype to long.
Whilst it would be good news to those with 4K monitors, I suspect that making that change would break lots of things.

However, if a Long number datatype had been used, form widths could theoretically be up to
2,147,483,647 / 1440 = 1,491,308 inches (3,787,922 cm) wide

That is about 23.54 miles (37.88 km) . . .
Imagine having a monitor that wide!