Ms Office Tune Up

As with reports, Access gives you an easy and a more advanced way to construct a form. The easy way creates a ready-made form based on a table or query. Keen eyes will notice that this process unfolds in more or less the same way as when you automatically generate a simple report (Section 8.1.1).

Here’s how it works:

1. In the navigation pane, select the table or query you want to use to generate the form.

   Try the Products table from the Boutique Fudge database.

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   Note: If you create a form for a parent table that’s linked to other tables, then you wind up with a slightly different type of form. If you create a form for the Categories table (a parent of the Products table), then you end up with a two-part form that lets you view and modify the category record and the linked product records in each category.
   

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2. Choose Create Forms Form.

   A new tab appears, with your form in Layout view. The simple form shows one record at a time, with each field on a separate line (Figure 9-1). If your table has lots of fields, then Access creates more than one column (Figure 9-2).

   
   Figure 9-1. This simple form for the Products table already shows a fair bit of intelligence. Access uses text boxes for all the text fields, a drop-down list box for fields that have a lookup (in this case, Product-CategoryID), and a checkbox for any Yes/No field (like Discontinued). It also makes some boxes (like Description) larger than others, because it notices that the underlying field has a larger maximum allowable length (Section 2.3.1.1).

   
   Figure 9-2. In this form for the Customers table, Access can’t fit all the fields using the ordinary one-field-per-line arrangement. Instead, it adds a second column.

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   Tip: Good design practices pay off when you begin building forms. If your text fields store a far greater number of characters than they need (as controlled by the Field Size property described in Section 2.3.1.1), then your form winds up with huge text boxes that waste valuable space. You need to resize them by hand.
   

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   When you first create a form, Access arranges the fields from top to bottom in the same order in which they’re defined in the table. It doesn’t make any difference if you’ve rearranged the columns in the datasheet. However, Access leaves any columns you’ve hidden in the datasheet (Section 3.1.4) out of the form.

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   Tip: You can add or remove fields in a form in the same way you do with a report. If the Field List pane isn’t open, then choose Form Layout Tools | Formatting Controls Add Existing Fields. Then, drag the field you want from the Field List pane onto the form. To remove a field, click to select it on the form, and then press Delete. However, keep in mind that people often use forms to add records, and if you want to preserve that ability, you need to make sure your form includes all the required fields for the table.
   

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3. Arrange the fields in the order you want by dragging them around.

   Although a simple form doesn’t look like the simple reports you learned about in Chapter 8, you can actually work with it in much the same way. One of the easiest ways to tailor your form is to drag fields from one place to another (Figure 9-3).

   
   Figure 9-3. To move a field, drag it to a new position. Access reshuffles all the other fields accordingly. In this example, the Price field’s being relocated to the top of the form, just under the Product-Name field. Access bumps all the other fields down the page to make room.

4. Change your columns’ widths.

   When you create a new form in Layout view, Access makes all the fields quite wide. Usually, you’ll want to shrink them down to make your form more compact. It’s also hard to read long lines of text, so you can show large amounts of information better in a narrower, taller text box.

   To do so, just click to select the appropriate field; a yellow rectangle appears around it. Then, drag one of the edges. Figure 9-4 shows this process in action.

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   Note: You may like to make a number of changes that you can’t accomplish just by dragging, such as adding a new column or giving each field a different width. To make changes like these, you need to understand layouts, which are covered in Access 2007: The Missing Manual.
   

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   Figure 9-4. Here, the Description field is being heightened to fit more lines of text at a time. You can also make a field wider or narrower, but there’s a catchwhen you do so, it affects the entire column. In this report for the Products table, every field always has the same width.

5. Optionally, you can click a field header to edit its text.

   This option lets you change ProductCategoryID to just Category.

6. Optionally, you can tweak the formatting to make the form more attractive, by changing fonts and colors.

   You can most quickly change the formatting of your form by selecting the appropriate part (by clicking), and then using the buttons in the ribbon’s Form Layout Tools | Formatting Font section. You can also use the Form Layout Tools | Formatting Formatting section to adjust the way Access shows numeric values. You learned about all your formatting options in Section 8.3.1 when you built basic reports.

   Often, you’ll want to format specific fields differently to make important information stand out. You can also format the title, header section, and form background. Figure 9-5 shows an example of judicious field formatting.

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   Tip: To select more than one part of a form at once, hold down Ctrl while you click. This trick allows you to apply the same formatting to several places at once.
   

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   Figure 9-5. You can select the field header (Price, for example) and the box with the field value separately, which means you can give these components different formatting. This form gives a shaded background fill to the Price, UnitsInStock, and UnitsOnOrder fields. It also gives a larger font size to the Price field and Price header, so this information stands out.

   If you’re in a hurry (or just stylistically challenged), then you can use a nifty Access feature called AutoFormat to apply a whole slew of related formatting changes. Just make a choice from the Form Layout Tools | Formatting AutoFormat section (which has the same AutoFormat choices you used with reports in Section 8.3).

7. Save your form.

   You can save your form at any time by choosing Office button Save. Or, if you close the form without saving it, Access prompts you to save it at that time.

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