Microsoft® Office Access 2003 Inside Out

Introducing ActiveX Controls—The Calendar Control

Although Access certainly provides a useful collection of controls to help you design your forms, for some tasks you might need something more complex. Access supports many ActiveX controls that provide functionality beyond the basic control set you can find in the form design toolbox. An ActiveX control is a small program that supports the ActiveX interface to allow Access to see the control’s properties and build a window to display the control’s user interface.

Microsoft Office 2003 installs dozens of ActiveX controls on your machine. It uses many of these in other applications such as Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or Microsoft Office Excel 2003. As you’ll see later in Chapter 27, Access makes ...