From the course: Cert Prep: Access 2016 Microsoft Office Specialist (77-730)

Create a form

- [Instructor] Creating forms in your database gives you a professional, clean way to view your records, and also a great way to add, edit, and delete data within your records. In this video, we'll learn how to create a quick form, and I'll review how to use the form wizard. I also want to show you a tool that I find a lot of users aren't even aware of, and that is the form templates that are available to you in application parts. Let's go ahead and take a look at our 05_01 create forms database. First, let's go ahead and create a quick form. Now on the create tab, in the forms group, we have form, that's your quick form. We can go into form design, or we can start with a blank form. I always recommend you use the form wizard, or do the quick form, and then you can always go into form design view, and make changes at that point. But if you really want to start with a blank form, you have a way to do it right here. We also have our navigation forms, that we looked at in an earlier chapter. And under more forms, we have a multiple items form, datasheet split form, and a modal dialog. Now to use that quick form, we simply click on one of our tables, and click form. Now this includes all of the fields from our 2016 table. It's pretty cool, isn't it? We also have three views in here. Form view, a layout view, and a design view. If all you're doing is moving fields around, or resizing fields, the layout view is sometimes the easiest view to do that in. If we want to see what the form truly looks like, we can go to form view, and this is where we can view our records one by one, using the navigation bar at the bottom. We can also insert a new record. Now keep in mind, anything that you do within this form is going to be added, deleted, or revised, right in the 2016 sales table. Let's go ahead and close our 2016 sales form. Save our changes, I'll just leave the default name, and go ahead and close that by clicking OK. Now let's use the form wizard to create a form that includes just some of the information in our employee information table. I'll click on create, form wizard, choose the employee information table. And this is where I can pick and choose the fields that I want to show. Let's do last name, first name, department, and the order in which I'm adding these fields is the order in which they will appear in the form. Let's go ahead and do date of hire, and their hourly rate. I'll click next, we have four different layout options, columnar, tabular, a datasheet and justified. Let's just leave it at columnar. And this is the last step, what title do you want for your form? We'll just leave the default employee information for now. And click finish. Once again, we can go ahead and use our navigation bar to go record by record to view the information. And if we wanted to update any of the hourly rates for the employees we could do it right in this employee information form, because it's tied right back to the employee information table. Let me go ahead and close this form. And let's talk about the application parts templates. Using the dropdown menu, we see that we have several blank form that we can create. We also have some quick start forms, a comments table. Now some of these have both tables and forms attached to them. And this is just another way to quickly add, for instance, contacts information, which would give you a brand new contacts table and contacts form. Let's have it look at for sales. We'd like to have it look at the customer contact information. I'm just going to click next, I'm just going to accept all of these defaults, because on the exam, if you're asked to create an application part, it's going to tell you just to accept all the defaults, so that's all I'm going to do here. Go ahead and click OK, and you can see everything that it added. We have a new contacts table, we can start entering our information into. We also have a contacts extended query that was created. We have contact details forms, where we can enter the contact information for each of our customers, a contact list. So you can see that it created all these different forms and one new table. If you find that you don't need all of these forms, you can delete the form, you don't have to use everything that it puts in there for you. So that gives you three ways that you can quickly and easily create a form. Practice using forms so that you'll be well prepared to tackle any task regarding forms on the Moss Exam.

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