Jeffrey,

I saw a demo of Visual CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) by Alan Biddle of www.ossiusa.com. As you may recall he won an MS/Advisor award for it. (http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/press/1998/May98/VFPExcpr.htm)

There was quite a lot going on in each of his forms. Maybe he would have some ideas of how to make it all work without visual overload. One thing noteworthy in his implementation is that each operator has 2 large monitors, and the app is very configurable so that each person arranges things in the way that is easiest for him/her to take it all in.

Also, he had these truck, plane, and boat icons which were drag/dropped onto locations to dispatch them. I guess it's like the windows interface - some people like "list" and some like "details." I loved them.


>I am developing an application for a trucking company and am starting to work on a dispatch form. They are currently using Excel to display the information that they use but this has several drawbacks. To me this suggests a grid but the problem is that they need to see so much info about each job (including the 20 trucks assigned) while displaying as many jobs as possible on the form that it needs display more than one row per record. I have started playing with custom controls to locate more than one text box in a container which I can then place in the grid but since I have never seen or heard of anyone doing this I have the feeling that I am going to discover something ugly or am overlooking an obvious alternative. Any thoughts?