Participation Project #19 - Access Forms

Creating a Form

There are two ways to create a form. The first is through the Form tool and the second is through the Form Wizard. The easiest way to create a simple form is to click on the object you want to use in the form, then click the form tool.

Step 3A should be fairly straightforward as long as you highlight the Districts table first and then click the button that says “Form.” To change the field labels, go into Design View and edit the labels. Be careful that you’re editing the labels and not the fields themselves; the fields will be white and opaque, while the labels will be transparent.

The boxes on the left in the above image are the labels, while the ones on the right are the fields containing data. If you change the fields containing data, it won’t know what table to pull the data from and when you go back into the Form View, you’ll have #NAME?  instead of data. See below. If you see #Name?, you have changed the wrong label. 

Form Wizard

For question 4B, you’ll use the FormWizard. This particular question asks you to create a form with a subform. This is super-important: when creating a form with a subform, there has to be a relationship between the tables and you have to pull the information from two separate tables. If there isn’t a relationship or you aren’t including multiple tables, you won’t get an option for a subform when  you click through the screens.

You can choose the information and fields you want to include using the drop down menu in the wizard.

In the image above, you can see that it’s giving you options for the fields in the Candidates table. Use the dropdown to change it from the Candidates table if you want to be able to choose fields from a different table. The double arrows (>>) will move all the fields from that table into the Selected Fields. If you click the single arrow (>) it will move them one at a time. You can move fields from the first table into the sheet, then change the table using the drop down menu and add more from that table as well. The easiest way to create a form with a subform is through the Form Wizard, although you can also do it using the Form tool as well.

Create your form by clicking on your main table, then go into Design View. In the Form Design menu that pops up, you’ll see the Subform/Subreport if you expand the Controls box.