Generating Jpegs from MS Access data

Question

I run a pub, and we create a graphic for each football game, music event or rugby match that we have on, and it's piped in to all of our screens to market the event. What I'm looking for is a way to automate this graphic creation within Access, so a Jpeg of a certain size is created and dumped in a folder, containing text that's been sized to fit from a couple of fields within the db, standard text, and a graphic, which may be a football, or a rugby ball, but will be optimised and stored in a directory. Has anyone done anything like this, or seen a module/object that will do what I require?

The app is already able to update twitter, and in time will be updating our online event calendar, so it makes sense to have it all in one central place.

Answer 1

To be really honest, I don’t access is the right tool here. However, if your whole database of events and upcoming data is access, then what I would consider doing is automating a power point screen.

So, the graphics + text + even some nice animations and screen transitions would work well in power point.

And, newer versions of power-point have some very slick TV like transitions. So, you could create some very slick looking rolling displays in power-point that would be piped out to those screens, but driven from access. So, between each slide you could insert drink specials and other things such as pub name + logo etc.

Here is a raw video (without sound or timings) of a power point 2010. This type of display could well be pumped out to your screens, and driven from Access.

http://cid-b18a57cb5f6af0fa.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/AccessVideo

Try watching the above, the above is done in power point 2010, and it could be driven from access...

Answer 2

Have you considered just creating an access report to template the look of the desired JPEG, then using a print-to-image printer driver to create the jpeg? You should be able to automate printing the report fairly easily from Access.

The advantage of this approach is that you get to use the graphical layout GUI features of Access which are pretty good.