Expanding Your Form Design Repertoire

The controls that the Form Wizard adds to the forms it creates are only a sampling of the 17 native control objects offered by Access 2003. Native controls are built into Access; you also can add various ActiveX controls to Access forms. Until now, you used the Form Wizard to create the labels, text boxes, and subform controls for displaying and editing data in the HRActions table. These three controls are sufficient to create a simple transaction-processing form.

The remaining 14 controls described in this chapter let you take full advantage of the Windows graphical user environment. You add controls to the form by using the Access Toolbox. List and combo boxes increase data-entry productivity and accuracy by letting you select from a list of predefined values instead of requiring you to type the value. Option buttons, toggle buttons, and check boxes supply values to Yes/No fields. You can place option buttons, toggle buttons, and check boxes in an option group. Inside an option group, the control you click sets the numeric Value property of the option group control. The Image control supplements the Bound and Unbound Object Frame controls for adding pictures to your forms. Page breaks determine how forms print. Access 2003's tab control lets you create tabbed forms to display related data on forms and subforms in a space-saving and more clearly organized fashion. Command buttons usually execute VBA event-handling procedures.

Note

The form-design techniques you learn in this chapter also apply to Access Data Projects (ADP). ADP forms are identical to conventional Access forms, except that the forms and controls bind to objects in SQL Server 2000 not Jet 4.0 databases.