Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Treo 650

My job entails me being away from the office on a regular basis. I've been using an iPaq as my pda for several years. As technology has advanced over the years, I've been constantly looking for a SINGLE device that I could carry to replace my pda and my cell phone. Most of the reviews I have read on these devices are that they do ONE function (cell or pda) very well and provide the basic functionality of the other. Verizon recently release the Treo 650, so I thought I would give it a shot to see if it would be a useful replacement.
At first, I must admit, I was ready to throw this device out the window. However, after some growing pains and learning the quirks (MANY!!) of the Palm OS, I've decided to stick with it. I don't know that I would call it a SMARTphone but it has become an essential tool. While I much prefer the Pocket PC operating system, the Pocket PCs were MUCH too pricey for me to consider. It certainly isn't perfect, but having always-on access to the internet, email, calendar and contacts (which wirelesssly sync to Outlook - thank to free software from Verizon) has made the 650 invaluable.

Choose Function

It's been a while since I've come across a new VBA function that I haven't used before AND find useful. The Choose function has similar functionality to the VLookup function in Excel. If you need to lookup a value but can't justify storing the values in an array, table, or lookup list, then the Choose function might be a good alternative.
Syntax

Choose(index, choice-1[, choice-2, ... [, choice-n]])

I recently used this in a database I was working with a database which tracks driver information for a trucking company. The driver classification was one of the fields in the database (not designed by me). I wanted to hide the classifications in code, so that some relatively savey Access user couldn't alter the 'lookup' field. So, I started to build my own lookup when I found the Choose function. I used it as the control source of one the driver classification text box on a form:

=Choose([class],"Experienced","Veteran","Suspended")

If the [class] had a value of 1, then the text box displayed "Experienced", 2 displayed "Veteran", and 3 displayed "Suspended."

I used the Choose function so that I could hide the three values in code and because I didn't want to add another table to the database to store just three values (which SHOULD never change). One other side note was that I knew that the [class] field was only being displayed on one form, otherwise I would have made my own Public function to display the results of the Choose function.