Ms Office Tune Up

Forms are almost always used as data entry tools, which means that most of your interac­tion with a form is via the keyboard. Yes, you can place mouse-friendly controls such as check boxes, toggle buttons (see “Using a Toggle Button for a Yes/No Field,” earlier in this chapter), option buttons, and list boxes on a form. However, most of your form time is spent typing entries into text boxes. This means that, in most cases, data entry in a form is most efficient when your hands stay on the keyboard as much as possible. This is helped by the fact that you can use Tab and Shift+Tab to navigate the form fields, as discussed in the previous section.

However, what if you need to skip over a number of fields? For example, you may edit a record and need to make changes to two fields that aren’t close on the form. Pressing Tab repeatedly isn’t efficient, and neither is taking one hand off the keyboard to click inside the next field with your mouse. A faster and more efficient solution is to define a shortcut key for each form field. A shortcut key is a letter or number that enables you to select the con­trol from the keyboard by holding down Alt and pressing the character. This character is usually underlined on the control’s label. For example, if you see a field named Address, and the A is underlined, then you can select that field by pressing Alt+A while the form is displayed.

Here are the steps to follow to define a shortcut key for a form control:

1. Assuming the control automatically comes with a label, insert the control. If the con­trol already exists on the form, skip to Step 2.
2. Click the label associated with the control.
3. Choose Design, Property Sheet to open the Property Sheet pane.
4. Click the Format tab.
5. In the Caption property, edit the label text by inserting the ampersand character (&) before the character you want to use as the accelerator key. For example, if the label has the text Address, editing the text to &Address sets up the letter A as the shortcut key (meaning that Alt+A will select the control associated with the label; see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Precede a character with the ampersand character (&) to set up that charac­ter as the control’s short­cut key.

TIP

If you want to associate another label with a control, first select the control’s current label and delete it. Add the new label (if you haven’t done so already) and then click the smart tag that displays. In the menu, click Associate Label with a Control, use the Associate Label dialog box to click the control you want to use with the label and then click OK.

CAUTION

To avoid confusion, make sure each control on the form has a unique shortcut key. If you acciden­tally use the same shortcut on two controls, Access displays a smart tag on both labels notifying you of the problem. Click the smart tag and then click Change Caption to see some suggested alternatives for the shortcut key.
If, for some reason, it’s unavoidable that two controls use the same shortcut key, note that you can navigate to the second control by pressing the shortcut key combination twice. For example, sup­pose you have the labels &Nameand &Numberon the form, in that order. Pressing Alt+N first selects the Namecontrol, and pressing Alt+N again selects the Numbercontrol.

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