Access Cookbook

Chapter 8.  Optimizing Your Application

One unavoidable fact of application design is that your application never runs as fast as you’d like it to. Unless you and your users are equipped with the latest and most powerful workstations with huge amounts of memory, performance will be less than ideal. Still, there are many techniques you can use to optimize your application, few of which are easily found in the Access documentation. Although your Access application may never run like that lean and mean dBASE II application you created 10 years ago, you certainly can make it run at an acceptable speed.

This chapter covers several optimizations that enable you to load forms faster, add and change data faster, and speed up your Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code, for example. It also covers the optimization of queries, as well as multiuser and client/server optimization techniques. In addition, this chapter describes testing techniques that will help you gauge the speed gains of your optimizations.

Accelerate the Load Time of Forms

Problem

The first time you open a form in your application, it seems to take forever to load. Is there any way to accelerate this?

Solution

You can radically improve the time it takes to load a form for the first time by preloading your forms when the database is initially opened. You can also decrease the load time for subsequent loadings by hiding instead of closing forms. This solution shows you how to improve form load time using these techniques. ...