Access Form Design View

In earlier versions of Access you had to use the form design view to make changes to the form. With Access 2000 you can make some edits in form view, but you still need to use the Form Design view in order to make many changes especially to the forms you have created using AutoForms or the Form Wizard.
Let us look at a form in Form design view:

Below is the same form in Form Design view (just click the View), the first button on the toolbar, the same as with tables and queries).

You may see the toolbox floating on your screen rather than anchored as it is shown here. A floating toolbox looks like this:

All information on your form (and on reports, too) is contained in a control. A control can be a label, like the field names on the report, or it can contain the contents of a field. Controls are commonly categorized as bound and unbound. A bound control contains content that comes from a field. On the form shown above, all the white boxes with text in them are bound controls. An unbound control will appear the same for every record. In addition, you may also have calculated controls on your form.

• Form Sections: The form displayed contains three sections that are indicated by the gray bands that span the form design: Form Header, Detail, and Form Footer. Optional sections of your form are Page Headers and Page Footers that appear on each page when the form is printed. You can add these sections (or remove them) by choosing View>>Page Header/Footer. You can change the size of a form section by clicking and dragging the form divider. So far you have seen two views for forms: form view and form design view. There is actually a third view:
• Form Datasheet View: In Datasheet view you see all the data that can be displayed in the form in a datasheet which allows you to see many records at once in a tabular format. If you are creating a form from a query or a filtered table, you may find this view useful. It allows you to see that the correct records are included. To see a form in datasheet view, display the form, click the down arrow next to the View button and choose Datasheet View.
  The Datasheet View shows the records in an Access table. In addition, each row is one record and the columns are the fields from the table's definition. This table contains the characteristics of a spreadsheet, but it does not function like an Excel spreadsheet.

In Datasheet view you see all the data that can be displayed in the form in a datasheet which allows you to see many records at once in a tabular format. If you are creating a form from a query or a filtered table, you may find this view useful. It allows you to see that the correct records are included. To see a form in datasheet view, display the form, click the down arrow next to the View button and choose Datasheet View. The Datasheet View shows the records in an Access table. In addition, each row is one record and the columns are the fields from the table's definition. This table contains the characteristics of a spreadsheet, but it does not function like an Excel spreadsheet.

Now that you know how to work with List Details views in your web browser, let us explore how to use Datasheet views within your web browser. Datasheet views displayed in your web browser function very much like table and query preview datasheets displayed in Access. If you have cleared the Read-Only view property for a Datasheet view (cleared by default), you can create new records, make changes to the data, and delete records within the browser window. To create a new record in a Datasheet view, you can click the Add Action Bar button or scroll to the bottom of the Datasheet view window until you see the new record line, and then enter your data on the new datasheet record. To delete a record, you can click the Delete Action Bar button or right-click the row selector on the left side of the Datasheet view, and then click Delete on the shortcut menu to remove the record. You can also use

Ctrl+Delete 

to delete the current or selected record in a datasheet. If you attempt to delete a record in a Datasheet view, Access Services first prompts you with a message to confirm the deletion. Analyze the elements of the Form Design view by clicking on the link Form Design Elements below.
Learn how to save your changes in Form Design view, in the next lesson.

The diagram below matches the form design elements to the corresponding terms listed below.

1. Toolbox
2. Toolbox button
3. Bound control
4. Unbound control
5. Form header
6. Detail section
7. View button
8. Section Divider
9. Help button