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Working with the Property Sheet

After you have selected a form, click the Properties button on the toolbar to view its properties. The property sheet, shown in Figure 5.47, consists of five tabs: Format, Data, Event, Other, and All. Many developers prefer to view all properties at once on the All tab, but a form can have a total of 119 properties! Instead of viewing all 119 properties at once, try viewing the properties by category. The Format category includes all the physical attributes of the form—in other words, the ones that affect the form's appearance (such as background color, for example). The Data category includes all the properties of the data that the form is bound to, such as the form's underlying record source. The Event category contains all the Windows events to which a form can respond. For example, you can write code that executes in response to the form being loaded, becoming active, displaying a different record, and so on. The Other category holds a few properties that don't fit into the other three categories.

Working with the Important Form Properties

As mentioned, forms have 67 properties and 52 events associated with them. Event properties are covered in Chapter 10. The following sections cover the Format, Data, and Other properties of forms.

Format Properties of a Form

The Format properties of a form affect its physical appearance. Forms have 39 Format properties. Many of them are described here.

• Caption—Sets the text that appears on the form's title bar. This property can be customized at runtime. For example, you could include the name of the current user or specify the name of the client for whom an invoice is being generated.

• Default View—Allows you to select from 5 available options:

• Single Form—Allows you to view only one record at a time.

• Continuous Forms—Displays as many records as will fit within the form window at one time, each presented as the detail section of a single form.

• Datasheet—Displays the records in a spreadsheet-like format, with the rows representing records and the columns representing fields.

• Split Form — Displays the records in both a Single form and Datasheet view at the same time. You can easily move from record to record in the datasheet portion of the form. As you move from record to record in the datasheet, the detail of the record appears in the Single form section of the form.

• PivotTable—Displays the records in a Microsoft Excel–type pivot table format.

• PivotChart—Displays the records in a Microsoft Excel–type pivot chart format.

The selected option becomes the default view for the form.

Allow Form View—Prior to Access 2002, Access forms had a property called Views Allowed. The Views Allowed property determined whether the user was allowed to switch from Form view to Datasheet view, or vice versa. The Default View property determined the initial default display mode for the form, but Views Allowed determined whether the user was permitted to switch out of the default view.

This material originally appeared in Alison Balter's book Mastering Microsoft Office Access 2007 Development. Reprinted here by author's permission.

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