Microsoft Access 2010 Tutorials
Data Forms / Starting from Scratch
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Subtitles of the Movie (Microsoft Access 2010 / Data Forms / Starting from Scratch)
Starting a form from scratch is the ultimate for control freaks like database administrators, programmer types and those people, and what this is going to do for you, is give you a blank palette that you can use as form artist if you will to design exactly the form you want, without anything being cluttered there to begin with. Now let me show you how to do that. Click on the Create Tab, and then in the Forms Section, you will notice Form Design, and if you left click on that, it drops you into a design environment. Now you may not see the Field List, or yours may look like this. I'm going to turn it off for now, we'll talk about it in just a second. The Detail View that you see here, this is a grid of a blank form, and your going to populate fields, labels, buttons, all kinds of things here, and build the form that you want. Now the Detail Section means, that anything that you put here is going to create repeating values for as long as there's data in the table, or being returned by the query that you use, or anything like that. Now you don't see a page header, or a page footer. We'll talk about those in just a few moments, but what I want to bring to your attention are some things that have been happening so far in the course with the Auto Form, the Form Wizard, and with starting one up from scratch like we're doing in this video, and that is right up here. Once we started creating the form, and we got to the Form Layout View, Design View, whatever in this area, our Ribbon up here had changed, and we're working in the Form Design Tools, this nice little purple area shows us, and three sections. Design where we work on design aspects of our form, dropping our fields, and labels on here. Notice logos, titles, dates, times, adding, you know looking at our Properties, Tab, borders, and that sort of thing. Arranging things, notice we can change the way things are arranged. We can insert rows, columns, all sorts of things. We can merge sales, we'll talk about that later, but anyway that's where we can arrange things, and then Format. And how do we Format things. And this is, looks very much like you see in Word and Excel and so forth, with fonts and sizes, and bold, and then formatting our numbers and so forth. But let's go back to Design. Two things you're going to use quite a bit here, and these are somewhat tricky to find sometimes, but notice if we're on the Design Tab, and we're actually in Design View, right up here is Add Existing Fields, and the Property Sheet. Now anytime we need to see the Properties of our form, we can click on Property Sheet, and they will show up over here to the right. We have the Format Tab, for anything that has to do with the format of the items of the form, Data, that has to do with data binding, or how the data behaves on the form, if it's coming from our table or our queries. Events that can take place on the form, based on user actions. Other Properties that can happen, and then my favorites the All Tab, and I can scroll through all of the Properties and Events, and see exactly what I'm looking for, and know that I'm not missing anything. Also depending on this different parts, pieces of a form, I can see those here, and notice I have the form, and then just the detail section, but I can work with all these aspects as well right now. So let's just go back to Form. Now I'm going to close the Properties Sheet. Now another very important one that you'll see, and a lot of times, this one will pop up for you is the Add Existing Fields, and again it's just a little explorer of your tables over here, and for example if I expand this, I can see the student information. Now let me show you a quick example here, if I left click on first name, and drag it on, and drop it, it dropped the label that appears in the table, and the text box, or however I'm going to be showing this data by default. Then I'm going to grab last name, and drop it on, and then I can drag it up here, and notice the way it's going to snap to the grid. I can line it up alright? Now if I right click up here, and go into Form View, there's my form, and notice I can come down here, and navigate through it, and I can see how my form's going to look and behave. I can right click and go back to Design View, and continue to design. Now let me show you something I haven't mentioned before, because again I didn't want to confuse with you buttons and switches, and all that. Down in the very bottom right, you will notice there are some buttons, Design View, Layout View, there is a Pivot Chart View, we'll get to later, Pivot Table View, we'll talk about later. The Data Sheet View, so I can see the underlying data, and then the Form View. If you like these, use them. Most people don't like them because it causes the Bar to show up down there. Most people get in the habit of right clicking, going to Design View, or you can come up here, and click between Data Sheet View, Design View, with the little Command Tabs that we've set up here, the one button, jobs on the Quick Access Toolbar. OK, now let's say that I want to get rid of all these, and notice I can left click and drag, and paint everybody, and then get the four arrows, right click, and choose to delete these. They go away, only from the form, not from the database. And I want to show you something really cool here. If I left click here, to come down to the bottom, hold Shift, left click on phone, now left click on everything, drag it onto the form area, notice it tries to line them up for me. Now anytime I want to, I can click on any one of these, and by moving it, notice it's going to move both the data area and the label, is going to go right with it, and I can put it right back where I got it OK? Now if I want to move just the label, I can click on this little gray box right up here, and move it, or if I want to move my actual text information, I can grab it and move it, and so you can see, I can lay my form out however I would like OK? And so that is a way to use the Form Design Tools to start to work with how I want the detail to lay out. Now the mess I've made so far, if we look at it in Form View, you can see here, it's not very user friendly. It does function, but it's not very user friendly, and I've got my layout messed up, and so you can see, how I can tweak this, and make it look like exactly what I want to, starting from scratch.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Microsoft Access 2010 |
| Author: | Mark Long |
| SKU: | 34224 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-91-7 |
| Release Date: | 2011-05-12 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 121 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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