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Asked: 2026-05-17T21:51:01+00:00

In my MS Access application I have several forms that are very data intensive

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In my MS Access application I have several forms that are very data intensive (several subforms based on even more tables). My users are complaining that when opening the data across the network the load times are unbearably long.

I have do have a slit front end / back end setup using the excellent autofe application.

One solution I have come up with to the problem is instead of docmd.close when the user clicks the “Save & Close” button I me.visible = false. The user then has the long wait time the first time after the application is loaded but for later loads performance is improved by a noticeable amount.

So far this has been working fairly well. I am just concerned that there may be some hidden gotchas hidden in this strategy that I haven’t encountered yet.

My users aren’t overly intelligent and I don’t use the application myself so I can’t expect to get meaningful feedback if something is behaving erratically.

Anyone else employed this strategy successfully or know of a good reason not to do it?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Anyone else employed this strategy successfully or know of a good reason not to do it?

    Yes, that strategy is similar to recipe #8.1 Accelerate the Load Time of Forms from the second edition of the Access Cookbook. However that recipe pre-loads a set of forms, with WindowMode:=acHidden, at database startup. So the tradeoff is that database startup takes longer, but subsequent form opens (for the pre-loaded forms) are comparatively fast.

    The discussion for that recipe didn’t mention any drawbacks for that technique. In limited use, I haven’t discovered any. And since it seems to improve your users’ experience, I would continue to use it.

    Beyond that, I would take a hard look at the amount of data your forms pull from the back-end database. Limit the number of rows retrieved as the Record Sources for the main and subforms. Give the user a method to select a different record or small set of records. Also make sure you use indexing to support Record Source WHERE and ORDER BY clauses. Avoid WHERE conditions that use functions which will force a full table scan to figure out which rows to exclude from the Record Source. Similar considerations apply to combo and list boxes which use saved queries or SELECT statements as their Record Sources; if you can’t limit the rows, at least make sure to optimize data retrieval.

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