Session 3 - Access Awesomeness Continues

Creating a Form and Subform

See notes from last week!

If you would like to watch the video on YouTube, click here

OR you can watch it below

Creating a Menu

The next stage of our little application is to build a menu that will tie it all together.

From the Create Ribbon, choose Blank Form. Go into Design View and start by adding a label for the main heading.

Once you have the heading, you can add command buttons to open the forms and eventually print reports etc.

Here are the steps to have a button to add and edit members.

You can pretty it up by including a background colour and different colur text etc. As this is our main menu, it would also probably contain our company logo.


Activity 1
Create a menu for our Video Vidiots system with the following buttons.

• Open your Member Form
• Open your  Products Form
• Open your Genre Form
• Open your Rentals Form
• Open your Returns Form

** Advanced Exercise - On your own, try and do the following:

• Add a Membership number combo box at the top of the form to select the Member from a list
• change the Barcode number in the subform to also be a combo box to select the correct movie from a list
• Change TAB order in the subform so that the membership number is first and Date returned last.
• Create a Form for RETURNS. This should have a drop down list to select the barcode and display the Rentals in a subform. You can then scroll through the list and select the last one - it should have returned date as blank.

Reports

While I much prefer to use the Form Design mode for creating forms, I am more than happy to use the Report Wizard to create simple reports. Reports are usually designed to be viewed on the screen and then printed, whereas forms are mostly for screen use. Many reports are straightforward listings and will require very little "tweaking".

Simple Report

A simple listing style report is created by using the Report button on the Create Ribbon. Just select the table or query and click the button.

Click on the table that you want to use for your report, and click on report.

This will create a report that contains every field in the table selected. Mine goes over 2 pages, which I don't want, so I will have to modify the design and reduce the width of a couple of fields.

I am happy with the final result as it now fits on a single landscape page.

Activity 2

• Create a Report to list of of our products.
• Create a Report to list all of our Members.

Custom Report

When you created the Members report, you would have found that by including everything, the report created is very cumbersome. We can create many different reports for different audiences and/or purposes. An example could be a Members report that just contains phone contact information. To do this, use the Report Wizard.

Follow the prompts to create a custom report.

Activity 3

• Create a phone contact list for your Members table
• Add this report to your Main Menu

*** Advanced Exercise

• Create address labels for your members table
• Create Barcode labels for your products (include Barcode plus Title) - HINT: you will need a barcode font to have an actual barcode on the labels. Use Avery J8164 labels.