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Microsoft Access 2010 Tutorials
Data Forms / Layout or Design View?
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Subtitles of the Movie (Microsoft Access 2010 / Data Forms / Layout or Design View?)
A common question when you're working with setting up your reports, and your forms and of course we're working with forms right now, we'll get to reports a little bit later on, is, what's the best environment to work on these things with, when we're actually building them, and you have two choices. There's Layout View and Design View, and I want to be totally honest with you here. The answer to this question depends on who's asking the question, who's answering it, kind of what they've been through that morning. Have they been fighting with their spouse? Did they have an accident on their way to work? Were they late? Is everything going great in their life? That sort of thing. Humidity effects this as well. The bottom line, though, let me give you the Microsoft take on these. The Layout View is a more visual working environment, now you are looking at your form or your report, the way it's going to look to the end user, and if I jump out to Access, you will notice that in Design View, I've got the grid back here, it's not quite as clean looking. If I go to the Layout View, this is the way it's going to look when the end user looks at it, and tries to use it to input data, and you can tell we have some things, out of whack here. We'll talk about alignment in just a second, but that's kind of the bottom line, is, it's just more visual in the Layout View. You can change the look and feel of a report or a form, you can re-arrange fields very easily, you can change the size of the fields. I'll show you some tricks on that in just a second here, and it's easy to configure alignment of fields, and that's probably the easiest thing in Layout View, and I'll show you that in just a minute out there in the environment. Now in Design View, I can independently format every area, and by that, we're kind of hinting toward, page headers, page footers, we haven't seen those yet. If you're going in the order of that the videos are in the course, when we get to reports, I will play a little closer attention to page headers and footers. You can edit your Text Box Control Sources, you can re-size form sections, the header, the detail that sort of thing. You have to do that in Design View, and there are some form Properties that cannot be changed in Layout View. We won't try to list all those here for you alright? The bottom line is, is you're just kind of got to get comfortable with one of these Views, and you will intuitively learn which one to go to for certain things. Now let me show you probably the biggest one. Notice I am in Layout View right now, and if I highlight, if I try to highlight all these guys, notice I'm left clicking, I can't do it alright? But if I click on one, and hold down the Shift key, and click on another, and another, and another, and another, and I go to Arrange, there's not a whole lot I can do here, I just have to drag them around individually, but if I right click here, and go into Design View, notice I can very easily, just highlight anything that I'm touching with this box, is going to be selected. So notice I've selected all of these, and when I go to Arrange now, notice I get this cool little Align guy here. Now this is a little different if you've done alignment in any of Microsoft's Development Tools, like the Visual Studio environment, or a lot of other software environments. Either the first or the last Control kind of is the anchored Control, and everybody lines up to that one. That's not the way it works here. If I choose Left, everybody's going to jump to the far left side, and I'm going to Control Z, and undo that. And notice if I choose Right, they're all going to jump to the ones on the far right, and everything's lined up perfectly. Now notice this age field, is not the same width as those, and if that bugs me, I can use my arrow keys, to bump it to the left, but notice it's also moving my labels, so I'm going to bump it back to the right, and if I go to Layout View, I can choose just that, and use my arrow keys, and bump it to the left, and notice my label is not moving, as my text information moves OK? Now I can also hold down the Shift key, hit the right arrow key, and make that field wider or more narrow OK? Now that's in Layout View. I can also do that in Design View, so I'll click on it, right here, and notice my right arrow key, when holding down Shift, will make that wider or narrower. And notice I can push my working area out, and if it collapses on me, I can grab that working area and pull it out. So you can kind of see there are some little nuances between Layout and Design, you'll just have to accustomed to them, but I wanted to show them but so that's a legitimate question, but again you ask four or five different Access designers, which one they like better, and you'll probably see a fight break out. They'll be a lot of agreement on some things, and some people disagree on others. Bottom line here, get your hands on it, play with it, see which one you like, and before you know it you'll be a guru at designing these forms and reports.
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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