MICROSOFT ACCESS DATABASE FORMS – PART 1

The Form Layout Tools tab contains the form customisation fields. Selecting it will display a screen like an image above. Now, feel free to play around with some of the settings to learn their role in form design and the stylish choices available to you. You may also visit the Home tab and find the View drop-down option where you can cycle through the form view options available.

Form Wizard Makes Form Creation Uncomplicated

Understanding the societal desires of people in order to constantly boost efficiency, Microsoft has incorporated a fairly helpful Form Wizard to enable the skipping of the grubby, hands-on detail

The Form Wizard is a useful, fast development tool for creating ms access forms. It enables you to manipulate the design and provides you with presets for rows, columns, table sizes, styles, and themes. You can use the wizard to quickly choose which form style suits your database and client prerequisites.

A Collection of ms access forms.

Obviously, you may not always need to import a database and set up a basic form. There are a few other form formats and design controls available to assist user navigation. Let’s examine the four form formats:

• Single Table Form is a single form which corresponds to a single database table. It is functional, basic and can be used to perform several tasks.
• Single Table Form with Lookup Field makes use of a single form and a single database setup. The lookup field allows the user to show data from another table or database, or outline the summarised values of a data range. The data is ‘looked up’ as required.
• Master/Detail Form is used if you have one master form that manages several subforms.
• Master/Detail Form with Lookup Field is the same as master/detail form but with added lookup fields in either the master or sub forms.

One of these form formats will be found in practically every Access database form you encounter. Take some time to acquaint yourself with their appearance, qualities, weaknesses, and where they should be used.

Using the Property Sheet

The Property Sheet is a helpful sidebar found in the Form Layout Tools tab. It contains reams of helpful information about the form and you can use it to promptly edit, alter, and toggle various options.

For you to understand the tool’s use, Access provides a helpful tooltip at the bottom left corner of the screen.

The options are too many to detail, so we will discuss the two most important Property Sheet options you may need immediately.

Hide a Field

Access allows you to hide individual field entries, so no other users will be able to access a certain field except you.

Choose the field you want to hide. In this case, we are choosing the party, from our current database form. After choosing the field, the sheet should update, and you will be able to select No from the Visibility drop-down option.

Lock Your ms access forms Up

Your database might as well need to be accessed

by other users, yet you don’t want them to intervene with the finely tuned internal workings of your tables and queries, and particularly your Macros or VBA code.

Go back to the Property Sheet. Look through the drop-down menu to find Form – the properties which will be edited will apply to the entire form.

Halfway down the sheet, you should see the accompanying options:

Change every property to No so the properties sheet should now match this:

Then change to Design View and in the properties sheet drop-down box, look for Form once more. Change Allow Layout View to No to stop other users from accessing the layout view where they could directly edit the form.

Distribution

We’ve created our form, we’ve altered the formatting, and we’ve restricted editorial access. Now we need to save our ms access forms for distribution.

Before you distribute, you need to convert the file to .accde format to restrict any further design or field edits. Then, save the current database to an easy-to-remember location.

It is also important to consider making another copy of the original database file before converting it in case the database will be corrupted.

Click File then choose Save As. Scroll down to find Make ACCDE and tick the Save as the button to save the file to .accde format. Type the file name when prompted then click Save.

Open the newly saved database. It is now restricted to form view only.

There will now be two records saved in your computer: the master copy (in .accdb format) and the distributed version (in .accde format). You may now distribute the file to your new users.