Form Design view

- In addition to the layout view, you can edit forms in a view called design view, which will give you full control over the placement and styling of every element on your form. I wanna spruce up our check-in form just a little bit more so that it ties into the branding of the Landon Hotel. A couple of things that I want to change here is the color on the top, I wanted to make it purple so it ties in with our color. I want to change the title here at the top. It's a little bit messy with the underscore. Same thing with the button here. I also don't like the dated and embossed styling of this button so we'll go ahead and change that. And finally I'm gonna remove this box over here that appears on the left side of our form.

When you click on it actually it turns black but nothing else seems to happen. This is actually a record selector for our form. Let's take a look at our table real quick here and a record selector in a table are these boxes over on the far left. If you click on them they select the record. That's exactly what's happening in our form but our record in the form takes up the entire height of the screen. So when I click on this box here it's selecting the record the same way it does in a table. But it actually doesn't make any sense to have here on our form so it makes sense just to get rid of it altogether. So those are the changes that I wanna make inside of our design view.

We can get to design view by going up here to the bottom portion of the view button, clicking it, and choosing design view. Remember, we also have shortcut icons to the different views down here in the bottom right-hand corner of our screen. And I can get to design view by clicking on this icon down in the far right. Once in design view, you'll notice that we have similar tabs to the layout view across the top. We have a design tab, we have the arrange tab, and we also have a format tab. However, we're not locked into a grid here in the design area. We can move elements anywhere we want on the screen.

Let's go ahead and click on it, and then click on the border of it, and you can move it anywhere you want. So let's get started making some of those changes that I outlined. First, I'm gonna click here in this pale blue area in the top anywhere, and then I'll go ahead and select it, then I'll come over here to the shape fill section that's on the format tab. And we'll go ahead and choose a new color. I'm gonna choose this light purple color right there. Then I'm gonna move the title over. Go ahead and select it, then click the border of it, and drag it over, let's actually make it a little bit shorter, and a little bit wider.

I'm gonna change what it says here. It says "check in, underscore, guests". I'm just gonna call it Hotel Registry. Then, I'll highlight all the text. And, still on the format tab, we'll go ahead and change the font color here to white. Next I wanna add a logo. To do that I'll come over here to the design tab, and I'll click on the logo button. That'll allow us to browse out to our computer and I'll go into the desktop, find my exercise files, and then go into chapter six, where I have a Landon logo .png file.

I'll select it and say okay, and that gets placed up here into my form. Now it's a little bit tiny, so I'm gonna grab the corner here and click and drag it to make it a little bit bigger on my form. Next I'm gonna take my title, I'm actually gonna scoot it over so that it's nicely aligned with my form elements down below. So go ahead and click on that. And it looks like I've actually selected something next to the logo so let's go ahead and see if I can get down underneath there. Let's press the delete key to get rid of whatever box that was. Now I can select that label, and I'll move it back to the left just a little bit. Next let's turn our attention to this button. Let's go ahead and click on it to select it.

We'll come over here to the format tab. And we do have the option underneath quick style to choose some of these styles. For instance, if I click on this orange one we'll get that style there, or I can click on one of the other ones. I actually wanna just change the color to a purple which is not available in my quick styles. So let's go ahead and change the shape fill on our own. I'll change it to this medium purple. And in our shape outline, I'll give it the dark purple outline. Next I wanna change the text that appears on the button itself. Let's go ahead and highlight that and instead of check-in room assignments let's go ahead and name it Room Assignments, and I'll place a space there.

I'll click off of it to deselect it and that's looking pretty good. The last thing that I wanted to do was get rid of that record selector that appeared on the far left-hand side of our form. To do that, I need to actually open up something called the property sheet. We can get to that from the design tab. And then over here, click on the property sheet. And we've previously talked about the properties of tables. Forms and reports themselves also have lots of different properties that we can work with. In the all tab of the property sheet, I'm gonna scroll down until I find a property called record selectors, and that's right about here on my screen.

It's currently set to yes, I'm gonna change that over to no. This way we can go ahead and close the property sheet, and I'm gonna save all of my changes just by pressing the save icon in the quick access toolbar. And then we'll switch our view back to form view to take a look at it with data. And actually that started to look pretty respectable, I'm happy with these changes. The form design view shares a lot of interface conventions that we'll see again when we start working with reports. And with it, you can customize your forms down to the smallest details.