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 arrow to collapse and open it to give yourself some more real estate. If you hold your cursor over the right edge, you'll get a double-headed arrow and you can make it wider or narrower as needed. You can click the Section headers to open and close them. You can use the search box at the top to quickly find what you're looking for.

For example, if I click in the box and type the word Customers, you can find all your database objects that contain the word customers. An added tip is that if you're clicked on any object in the Navigation pane, pressing Ctrl+F on your keyboard will jump your cursor up to the search box window. But that only works if you're already clicked there and not somewhere else on the screen. I'll click this little button to clear my search and see all my objects again. You can also Sort and Resort the Navigation pane so it's useful for you.

Right now it's sorted by object type. So all my Tables, my Queries, my Forms, and my Reports are grouped together. If I go to this little dropdown, this arrow inside the circle, I have more options. I like to use Tables and Related Views. If I get a message, I will go ahead and click OK and now it resorts itself. Here's my Customers: Table and then here are all the Queries, Forms, and Reports based on it. Below that is my Orders: Table and all of its Queries, Forms, and Reports.

Now if you have forms and reports that are based on more than one table, you may see them in more than one place. For example, my Orders by Customer Report has elements of both my Orders table and my Customers table. So I see it in both places. You can also reorganize by the date that objects were created or by when they were modified. Things I did today, things I did last week. The bottom half of the dropdown also allows you to filter. For example, let me change this back to Object Type, so that I am back to seeing my tables together and my queries together et cetera.

I'll drop this down and now I can filter it so that I am just looking at my queries. There are all my queries and everything else is hidden. When I'm done, I'll go back to the dropdown and choose All Access Objects, and everything is back again. Because the Navigation pane is so flexible, you can organize it and re-organize it any which way you need depending on your task at hand.