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The New Record Navigator

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One of things you might notice that we have changed this time around is the Record Navigator. We have some fond feeling for the Record Navigator as it was shipped in Office 2003 and previously (below), but quite frankly the look was more than outdated.

 

  

(An interesting tid-bit: the icons on the buttons were actually hand-drawn at every refresh. I guess bitmap loading was too advanced when this was first coded. ziiiiinnnnnnng).

 

Here's how the new Record Navigator looks like:

 

 

You will notice that not only does it look nice, but we also added some new functionality to it. The first thing you will (hopefully) quickly notice is the 'No Filter'/'Filtered'/'Unfiltered' button. This is a quick and handy indicator that you're looking at a partial set of your data. It is also a button, so you can apply/remove filters right there and then.

 

(Another interesting tid-bit: we discovered that a lot of people get confused when they are looking at filtered data. They don't understand what happened to the "missing data", and think that it was just lost).

 

Of course, if you took a close look at it, you noticed the picture says "Bananas:" instead of the usual "Record:". We added a new "Navigation Caption" property in the property sheet that allows you to customize the label shown in the Record Navigator. You can put whatever you want, even something that doesn't end with a colon.

 

Another interesting piece of functionality is the Search Box. This is an edit box that as you type we conduct a case-insensitive search across all records from the first column/control of the first record. If you hit ENTER, we will cycle across the multiple found instances of what you are searching.

 

Of course, the Search Box is not meant to replace the full search functionality available in the search dialog (CTRL + F), but to allow you to do quick and dirty global searches (which is very common) without having to go throw the dialog.

 

An interesting trick is that you can set the focus to the Search box by hitting CTRL + SHIFT + F, and move the focus to the found item by pressing ESCAPE (this also resets the Search Box). This is very handy when doing a quick search and then edit.