I had another sheet of garden data to plug into my Folia database today, which is presently set up on MS Access. Now that I’m back to working in Open Source orientated web development, I can see it is going to shift back to an Open Source database back end with a web-based interface but I’ll stick with Access a bit longer. Access does make it pretty easy to throw together a simple form but if you want to do something more interesting, it can be awkward and also difficult to figure out where things are squirreled away.

My task today was to enhance the “event” entry form so that, once I’ve plugged in the plant ID, it pops up the name as a confirmation. After trying to remember / guess what to do for a few minutes, I thought I’d ask Microsoft’s Co-pilot AI tool. The first answer didn’t work but I was able to give it the error message I encountered and get the information I needed (in this case, don’t bind the field you want to update to a specific data source).

It is essentially functioning like a help system where you explore by asking questions. You still need a fair amount of knowledge to make use of the answers and to refine the questions but it did mean I got to the result I was after in a reasonable time frame instead of reaching the point where I might have given up. For now, at least, I’ve got a better interface and also a concept I can take forward into whatever the next system iteration is.