Access Form Design

 

Access Database Form Design

Access Forms Programming Tutorial:  In this section of our website we provide programming tutorials and examples for several methods and issues associated with Access form design and programming. Our goal is to offer you information needed to create user-friendly Access forms.

Navigation links to the detailed Access form examples can be found on the navigation menu on the left side of the page.  Below you will find excerpts from some of the examples. We have three sections of our website devoted to different aspects of Access form design and programming:

Access forms programming creates the user’s interface to the data and database functions.  User interface design and form functionality are key to successful database implementation.

Microsoft Access forms are easily setup with the form wizard.  However, when you want to add functions and features to the form’s operation and layout you’ll eventually need to enter the world of Visual Basic.  Access form programming data field validation, coordination of combo boxes, manual coordination of disconnected subforms, all provide a challenge to the casual user or novice Access developer when developing a smooth user interface.  In this section of our website we cover Access forms examples for common issues found during form design, some of which you may not have seen before.

We don’t use macros in any of our examples – all coding is done using visual basic, either directly attached to the form or as function and subroutine calls to visual basic modules.

Below is a list of our Access form design tutorials.  Click the link to see the full example page:

Unbound Access Form Tutorial
Unbound forms are used for comprehensive field validation and control.  See how we perform transaction processing and field validation with an Access unbound form.  Unbinding the form frees our programming code from some of the restrictions imposed by Access.

Not In List Event Forms Tutorials

Combo box/lookup lists advanced VBA with form popup.  There are many   examples of dropdown list and combo box notinlist event handling on our website.  However, there are occasions when you will require advanced methods to handle lists that are not one-column dropdown lists or combo boxes.

In our example we have a bond trading data entry application and we want to be able to add new customer records on-the-fly

Master/Detail Continuous Access Forms Examples
(parent/child) Access form/subform example with both forms continuous.  Ever tried to put a sub form into a master form and have both forms continuous at the same time?  Access won’t let you right?  See example coding method for placing two continuous forms on the screen and have them automatically coordinated.

Programming Subtotals Form Tutorial
Form subtotals, totals & grand totals.  Placing total fields and subtotal fields at the bottom of a continuous form is anAccess Forms intermediate-level form programming tasks in MS Access.  Grand totals appearing in the main form are a bit more complicated.  See how we implement these totals and grand totals on a form.

Improve Form Performance and Opening Speed
Form performance is an important component of creating a user friendly interface to your programs.  More than a few seconds waiting time and the user will become frustrated and everything goes downhill from that point on.  We have developed methods to increase form opening speed from minutes (worst case) down to a seconds.  This performance increase is most notable on linked tables going across a network.

Don’t miss our Access forms design and user interface design guidelines and recommendations.  See what to do and what not to do in terms of combinations of fonts, colors and layouts from which to choose from.  It is important to select a combination of features which will give a simple and pleasing interface to the user.  See below a complete discussion on this topic at ourAccess Form Design & User Interface Design tutorial page.

Change Textbox Height
Do you ever have the need to see a little more of a text box?  Here is a method to temporarily expand the size of a text box on a form using a simple click or double click command.

Retrieve Website Data
We all have wondered how to retrieve data from a website using VBA code.  Well here is a visual basic method to do just that!  In this example we send a request to Yahoo!’s finance page in order to get some up to date stock information.  This technique can be expanded for most any website but you need to parse the results of the return page to extract the information you need.   This example is simple since the Yahoo! api is design for data transfer purposes.