I watched half of a new Access Users Group video on the tree view control by Pete Poppe which I link to at the bottom of this message. I learned something new.

The last time I used the Treeview control I never ended up implementing it in a customer’s project because of 2 reasons:

1. It was an ActiveX control. I find it somewhat difficult to manage these controls for customers because they require certain DLL’s to be installed and referenced on the system. I personally prefer to try to find native controls that don’t require special references when possible.
2. At the time I was toying with it there was not a 64 bit version of the control reference available. There were no promises that the common controls dll would ever be 64 bit and in fact the opposite was being said at the time, so I thought that there would never be a 64 bit version of the control. I wanted all my databases to be able to run on 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Access so using this control simply wasn’t an option.

It turns out that there has been a 64-bit version of the control ocx file put out there. I tried to look for a good link to download, but it appears not to be a common download and perhaps is not Microsoft sanctioned? I don’t know.

In any case, my interest is again piqued in this control I like what it can offer and I like the potential of the class wrapper Pete Poppe wrote. He has some great demos and information on how to use the Treeview control with Access, along with some warnings that it is somewhat unstable. Even so, with proper care, this could be a really good control to learn as it is very powerful and significantly unique and suitable to solving a number of issues and visualization of data and relationships.

Have you ever used Treeviews? At all? In a customer project?