Microsoft® Access® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

32

Creating Forms in Design View

As you saw in the preceding lesson, several designers (and other methods) are available for creating and building forms in Access, one of which is the Form Layout View designer. Now that you understand some of the basics of building forms, this lesson explores the traditional approach to designing forms in Access: using the Form Design View designer.

Form Design View goes all the way back to the beginning of Access; it was the original designer created for working with forms in Access. Design View enables the developer to create and manipulate the form and its objects in a grid-based format. Although you won't be able to see specific data from the Data Source in the form while designing it, the true power of this designer comes from the granularity you have when working with controls in this mode. This lesson discusses the basics of building Access forms using the Form Design View designer provided in Access 2010.

LESSON SETUP

To begin using the Access Form Design View, you really don't need anything at all; you can just create a blank form in a blank database and start building from there. However, it might be easier to get started if you have a table with a few fields in it. The discussion in this lesson assumes that the database file has a couple of tables in it.

BOUND VERSUS UNBOUND

In the previous lesson, you created a quick form from an existing table, which automatically set the Record Source property of the form to the specified table. When ...