Switchboard Forms

Switchboard forms are a common way to facilitate navigation in an application. It is common for switchboard forms to contain several command buttons that users can click to open another form. This section offers two approaches to using switchboard forms: one based on hyperlinks and the other based on VBA procedures.

Navigating with Hyperlinks

Hyperlink navigation is particularly easy to create because you do not have to write any code (although you can manage hyperlinks with VBA). Hyperlinks can act as shortcuts to database objects in an application, documents on your hard drive, files on a network, or World Wide Web pages on the Internet or pages on an intranet. Access lets you use hyperlinks with labels, buttons, and images.

You can set and edit hyperlink properties from a form's Design view or programmatically using VBA. Using the manual procedures for setting and editing hyperlinks is not only easier but can yield faster-loading forms because forms with hyperlinks created in Design view do not require that a module contain VBA code. To deliver this benefit, a form must have its Has Module property set to No.

NOTE

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The Hyperlink data type lets an Access application launch hyperlinks from table or query fields. While Hyperlink fields are in many ways like the hyperlink properties, you use them differently. See Chapter 13 for coverage of using hyperlinks for Web development.

Figure 5-2 shows four forms that use a simple navigation system. The main switchboard form on the left transfers focus to one of the other three forms when the user clicks a hyperlink on the main form. Once another form has the focus, the user can return the focus to the switchboard by clicking the hyperlink to the main form.

Figure 5-2. A simple hyperlink navigation system.

You can easily introduce more than two tiers into a navigation system. Typically, each child form can return focus to its parent form. Main forms often include a way to exit the application or exit Access.

To create a hyperlink using the Label control, follow these steps:

1. Click the Build button next to the Hyperlink Address property or the Hyperlink SubAddress property on the label's property sheet.
2. In the Insert Hyperlink dialog box, select the type of object to link to from the Link To list.
3. Enter the information for the type of object.
4. Click OK.

NOTE

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By default, unfollowed hyperlinks in an Access session are blue and followed hyperlinks are maroon. You can change these colors by choosing Options from the Tools menu, clicking on the General tab, and then clicking Web Options. Use the two list boxes in the Web Options dialog box to set the colors.