Access ELF "If I misunderstood your question. . ." Window

Also known as the Edit Query dialog, the Help me to try again  .  window is reached by selecting the "Eraser" from the Toolbar. This dialog can help explain some of the reasoning that Access ELF has applied in getting from your question to its answer. More importantly, it lets you override the specific decisions used by the software for this question, on a one-shot basis.

By blocking out one or two wrong guesses, you can often quickly get to the result you want. This isn't a substitute for permanent enhancements to your interface; but sometimes you just want a fast answer.

Let's look at an example from the Northwind database. Suppose we type in Show the employees and their interests. Now, there's no INTERESTS field in the database, but maybe we were thinking of the Notes field associated with each employee, which lists their educational pursuits and other information. But Access ELF interprets this somewhat differently, generating this SQL:

SELECT DISTINCT Employees.EmployeeID , Employees.Title , Employees.LastName FROM Employees ;
which gives...
Employee ID       Title       Last Name
1      Sales Representative     Davolio
2      Vice President, Sales     Fuller
3      Sales Representative     Leverling   etc.

If we click Edit Query, we can convince ELF to try a different tack. First, look in the drop down box next to What's Wrong. It's usually a simple matter to pick out the one or two associations that we don't agree with. In this case, it's interest=>Title (based on similarity).

If you're in a hurry, you won't care why ELF made this particular mistake. We'll pause to look behind the scenes, though. The "similarity" here is that the dictionary definitions of the two words "interest" and "title" each contain an identical word as one of their major synonyms. "Interest" is defined as: "concern, regard, claim" etc. while "title" is defined as "claim, pretense, pretension". (We don't make these up, we just get them out of the dictionary!)

Whatever the reason, it's clearly not what we want. If we select this into the What's Wrong list, and click Try Again, Access ELF will generate SQL like this:

SELECT DISTINCT Employees.EmployeeID , Employees.LastName FROM Employees ;

It's dropped the reference to Title (as we suggested). If instead we'd chosen Employees (table) Notes (field) from the What's Missing selector, Access ELF would have generated:

SELECT DISTINCTROW Employees.EmployeeID , Employees.Title , Employees.Notes , Employees.LastName FROM Employees ;
showing both the Title and the Notes field. And of course, if we do both, in effect telling Access ELF to substitute the Notes field for the Title field, that's exactly what we'll get:

SELECT DISTINCTROW Employees.EmployeeID , Employees.Notes , Employees.LastName FROM Employees ;

The What's Wrong box also has a "sticky" check box, for those times when Access ELF seems to be repeating the same annoying error. Normally, the contents of the What's Wrong list box are cleared whenever you move on to a new query (that is, you query from the Query window, rather than using the Try Again button). To override this behavior and make the correction stick during the life of the session, use the Remember "what's wrong" until cleared check box. You clear the list manually by double-clicking entries, or just by setting this check box back to Off and asking a new question.

There are a couple of other useful features on this dialog. If you want to narrow down the list from the previous results, you can use the Do you want me to be more specific? drop-down box, which lets you specify conditions to look for or to exclude. So for instance we could pop back into this window and add:

Only include records that have...       business

Access ELF then generates this SQL:
SELECT DISTINCTROW Employees.EmployeeID , Employees.Notes , Employees.LastName FROM Employees ORDER by LEFT(Employees.Notes,255) ; SELECT * FROM elfQ1 WHERE [Notes] Like "*business*";
which helps us pick out Laura Callahan, who's completed a course in business French.

Finally, this is the dialog where we've placed the Samples listings. It often helps to look at examples of query syntax, to get a feel for the range of what the system can do...and what it can't do. Here you can choose from a full listing of all the samples or a listing that's keyed off the words you last used in a query.