Cleaning Up Your Form: An Overview

After you've created a form, you might find that it doesn't quite look as good as you like. Controls might need realignment , or you might want to resize the label for a particular control or controls. You also might want to expand the form grid areas so that you can rearrange the form controls or add additional controls to the form.

All these actions can be accomplished in the Form Design view. Using this view, you can edit the structure of any form that you create, regardless of whether you created the form using AutoForm, the Form Wizard, or the Design view.

Moving Field Controls

The most common change to a form is to reposition a control. For example, you might want to move several controls down so you can insert a new control, or you might want to rearrange how the controls appear on the grid.

If you placed controls on the form to begin with (rather than using AutoForm or the Form Wizard), you have probably noticed that the control consists of two parts : a label and the actual control. You can manipulate various aspects of the label and the control independently (such as their sizes or the distance between them). You work with label and control sizing later in this lesson.

Tip

More Space If you want to create extra space at the bottom of the controls so that you have more room to move them around, drag the Form Footer pane down so that more of the Detail area is visible. You can also drag the right side of the grid to make the form wider. If you need more space at the top of the form, highlight all the controls and move them down as a group .

Follow these steps:

1. From the database window, select a form in the Form list, and then click the Design button on the database window toolbar. The form is opened in Design view.

2. Click a control's label to select it. Selection handles appear around the label (a displacement handle also appears on the control, but you don't want to touch that right now). You can select several controls by holding down Shift as you click each control's label.

3. Position the mouse pointer on the edge of the control's label so that the pointer becomes a hand (see Figure 13.1). If you're moving more than one selected control, you can position the mouse pointer on any selected control's label.

4. Drag the control's label and the control to a new location.

5. Release the mouse button when the control is at the desired new location.

Caution

The Label Moved Without the Control Attached! When you position the mouse pointer over the control to be moved, be sure the pointer changes to an open hand, as shown in Figure 13.1. If you see a pointing finger, you are on the control's displacement box. The pointing finger is used to move controls and labels independently, as you'll learn in the next section.