Access 2010: The Missing Manual

Linking to Related Data

A menu or navigation form providing a bird’s-eye view of your database. However, your work doesn’t end here. A well-designed navigation system lets you move easily from one form to the next, so you can move efficiently through your entire database.

The secret to form-to-form navigation is thinking about your workflow (that is, the order in which you move between tasks when working on your database). Suppose you’re a furniture company selling hand-painted coffee tables. What happens when you receive a new order? Probably, you start by creating or selecting the customer (in one form), and then you add the order information for that customer (in another form). The menu doesn’t need to go directly to the order form. Instead, you should start with a customer form. That form should provide a button (or some other control) that lets you move on to the order form.

You need to go through a similar thought process to create forms for, say, the customer service department. In their case, they need a way to pick a customer and to see, at a glance, the billing and payment details, the order information, and the shipping records. The best solution in this scenario could be to create a compound form that pulls everything together.

Getting from one form to another is easy. All you need is the right button. The following two sections walk you through two common examples.

Showing Linked Records in Separate Forms

In Chapter 13, you learned how a subform control can show linked records ...