For the more polished and professional database, using Access form designs doesn’t necessarily mean viewing records from tables and queries. It can also serve as a general way to manage your MS Access database objects namely Access reports.
For example, running reports from a nicely designed form showing a list of available reports that calls another form (perhaps for its criteria) before it actually displays the preview or hard copy report can improve the usability of your custom built application.
By having an Access form design to list all the reports in a List Box control with a series of command buttons to choose the output (how they run), drives the associated form (criteria) and then the actual report which are all stored in your custom built table.
Some VBA code will be ideal to handle the logical workflow but with some further thought and effort I’m guessing this could be also carried using just macros (more so for the later versions of Microsoft Access).
Access Form Designs – How To Create A Report Interface For Your Access Database
This utility feature looks at a table which could be made from an example as shown below:
This table will drive the forms List Box control by populating the values entered in the ‘Report Title‘ field as well as using the bound column index for the other fields too.
By setting a record as enabled, it allows a report to be visible which means this is an easy way to manage any new pending or the removal of old redundant reports without physically deleting any records. That’s just frowned upon!
Now we have the ability to add records to this table which is filtered and displayed in our reports form (see above illustration).
A button click will use either Access VBA code or even a macro to run either the report or a form associated for that report using some logical test using the ‘Criteria‘ field to tell it to call the form if true (or if false, call the report instead).
I’m not going to give you the code here but at this point you should be getting the picture?
Be creative in how you can utilise this technique to handle many other processes not just a reporting module – Microsoft Access form designs are very powerful indeed.
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Tags: Access form, access form designs, access forms listbox control, building access forms, how to create a form in ms access, microsoft access database forms, Reports
“This table will drive the forms List Box control by populating the values entered in the ‘Report Title‘ field as well as using the bound column index for the other fields too.”
How do you use the bound column index for the other fields considering that the bound column property determines which column’s values to use as the value of the list box?
Each List Box (or Combo Box) uses a Column Count and Column Widths (to name a few) and the Bound Column is the key field which the List box uses by default.
In my example, I have 5 fields where the first column (index = 0) is the Report title. The remaining four fields in their order will be referenced as Column(1), (2), (3) and (4) respectively (all which are set to a zero width meaning it’s hidden).
By using something like [YourListBoxName].Column(1).Value, you are calling the selected item’s second column, in my example that would be the ‘FormObjectName’.
Hope that made sense?