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Date: Jan 10 1999
From: Meredith Marshall
To: ron@oreilly.com
Subject: Using grids with VBA
Ron,
I'm developing a financial tool in the Office 97/Excel VBA
enviroment. I would like to incorporate a grid into the interface
that can read/write/edit to a database component (Access or Oracle).
I tried the DBGrid (Apex software) without success and then learned
that it was not VBA compatible, only VB compatible. Are you aware
of any grid objects that can be used in the VBA development
environment?
-Meredith
Hello Meredith,
I'm by no means an expert on data access from a hosted VBA
environment, nor have I worked extensively with anything other than
the controls provided with the MSForms library. So perhaps I should
plead ignorance before I embarrass myself. However, that hasn't
stopped me before, so I don't know why it should now...
The data grids are bound controls; that is, they require a data
source that actually connects to a database and retrieves their
data. And it seems to me that the root of the problem with DBGrid is
that there's no data source that can be readily included along with
the DBGrid control. In Visual Basic, the solution is simply to
include the Data Control on the same form as DBGrid. But the Data
Control is an intrinsic control; it's unavailable to anything
outside of the Visual Basic environment itself. (Of course, there
may -- and probably are -- third-party products available; I have no
idea.)
Microsoft is now aggressively promoting OLE DB and ActiveX Data
Objects, and VB 6.0 has a new set of data controls (DataGrid,
DataList, DataCombo, MSHFlexGrid, MSFlexGrid) that once again are
bound controls. Unlike DBGrid, though, they support OLE DB, and
therefore rely on the an ADO Data Source (and in particular the
ActiveX Data Objects Data Control, or ADO DC) for data access.
Unlike the Data Control, the ADO DC is a custom control (that is, an
.OCX) that can be added to any project. In short, if you add ADO DC
to your project along with the DataGrid control, you should be able
to use them without problem. At least, I did a few trivial tests,
and had no difficulty at all.
By the way, Microsoft supplies OLE DB data providers for both Access
and Oracle databases, so OLE DB/ADO should definitely be able to get
at your data.
I hope that this helps.
--Ron
Return to: Ron's VB Forum
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