Customizing the Navigation pane

The Navigation pane on the left-hand side has a few tricks up its sleeve so that you can use it effectively for your workflow. Let's take a look at its features. First you can click this little double-headed arrow to collapse it and open it again when you need extra real estate on your screen. If you hold your cursor over the left edge, you get a double-headed arrow and you can make it wider, or narrower. You can click the Section headers to open and close them. There is a Search Box at the top. If I click in it and start typing the word Customers, I can find all my database objects that contain the word customer.

An added tip is that if you've clicked on any object in the Navigation pane, pressing Ctrl+F will jump your cursor up to the Search Box, but that only works if you've already clicked in the Navigation pane and not somewhere else on the screen. I will use this little button to clear my search string and bring all of my objects back. You can also sort and resort the Navigation pane so that it's useful for you. Right now it's sorted by Object type, so all my Tables, all my Queries, all my Forms, and all my Reports are together.

But click this little dropdown in the circle. Another view I like is Tables and Relative Views. This starts with my Customers Table and then shows me all of my queries, my forms and my reports based on that table. When I go down to SalesReps, there is my SalesReps table and all of its Queries, Forms, and Reports. If you have a Query, Form or Report based on more than one table, you will actually see it in both places. SalesReps and Customers, SalesReps and Customers, another option under the dropdown is I can see my objects in the order they were created or I can also view them in the order they were modified.

When I click on this, it will show me my tables at the top, things I did Two Weeks Ago, Last Month and before that. Also on the dropdown menu there is Filters. So if I just wanted to see things from Today, I can click that, or I will go back to Object Type and when I drop that down, now I can for instance see just my queries. When I am done, I will choose the circle with the dropdown and select All Access Objects, and now I can see everything again.

Because this Navigation pane is so flexible, you can organize it and reorganize it any which way you need depending on your task at hand.