GCRB: Common Problems & How To Fix Them

If you are using the Game Caddie Record Book (GCRB), the Access database for tracking golf stats, you may run into problems that you can’t figure out. I suspect this is particularly true for folks who haven’t used Access before or don’t use it on a regular basis. No shame in that.

Here are some common problems and how to fix them:

Some places in reports have “####” instead of data. This simply means that the cell size is too small for the information that is being reported. 

Solution: Open the Shutter Bar by clicking on the >> button in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Scroll to find the report you want to edit. Right-click on it and select Layout View. Highlight the the cell you want to enlarge by clicking on it. Place the mouse over the left side of the cell until you see ↔. Click and drag that side of the cell farther to the left. If when you release the mouse button, the correct information is now shown, you are done. If not, drag the left side even more to the left. 

After you start a new round, the Tournament Summary report prints twice and is missing some information. Most likely, you forgot to edit the query that contains wind and course condition settings for the new round.

Solution: See this post for how to edit the join properties for qryRoundConditionsT1. (Edit the query that matches your tournament number, of course.) The post also explains how to edit the mBatchT1 module, if you are running batch reports from the Main Menu.

The Scoring By Hole report won’t run and gives a “data type mismatch” error message. This may mean you have blank records in tblScorecards.

Solution: Open tblScorecards. Do you see blank records at the top of the table? If so, delete them. If you are using the GCRB Export Template to import records into the database, you may get tens of hundreds of blank records (along with the data you want) each time you do an import. 

Normally, these blank records will appear at the top of the database, so they are easy to find and get rid of. Just click on the leftmost column of the first blank record, then scroll down to find the last blank record. While holding down the Shift key, click on the leftmost column of the last blank record. All the blank records should be highlighted in blue now. Right-click and select Delete.

If you have sorted tblScorecards, the blank records may “appear” after your visible data. The record counter at the lower left of the screen tells you how many records are in tblScorecards, including blank ones. Click on the last row of visible data. The two numbers in the record counter should match. If they don’t, the difference between the two numbers is how many blank rows you have. Delete them and the Scoring By Hole report should run just fine.

The totals in the Scoring By Hole or Par Variance By Hole reports don’t add up to the number of holes played. You are probably missing fields in those reports for some of your hole results.

Solution: Open the report in Design View. Click on Add Existing Fields in the menu toolbar to highlight it. Note what numbers appear in the Field List but aren’t in the Detail section of the report. Click and drag those numbers from the Field List to where you want them to appear in the Detail section of the report. Delete the labels that Access automatically creates when you do this. Add your own labels by clicking on the Label button in the menu toolbar and place them in the Page Header section. Format as desired.