Creating a Main Menu Form in an Access Database

okay to make a main menu we're going to go to the create menu again I'm going to choose this time a blank form so I'm not going to use the wizard or the form design I'm going to go for a blank one click on the blank form here it is I want to see that in design view though so I'm going to swap swap the design view and probably the first thing I'll do is just change the background color to something a bit nicer okay so all I want to do on here is I want have a label telling me what it is and I want to have some buttons that can open other forms and reports and things like that up so I'm going to go for my label first stick my label on there and I'm just going to type in main menu now I can obviously make this bigger and change the color and make it more attractive and do all one afterwards so I'll just for the time being I'll just make it a little bit a little bit bigger so we can see it more easily and I'll just change the color I think so it stands out a bit more okay so there's my label to put a button on I go back into my format site into my design window for my form design tools and this one here with a little X's on a button so I click on my button I drag my button where I want it to go and then I get this little wizard that pops open now this wizard is basically asking me what I want my button to do when I click on it so the first thing I do I'm going to look for a form operation so I want to open a form so I'm going to choose form operation open the form click Next and there's the only form I've got in this called videos form I'm going to choose that one I do want to open it and show all the record so I say Next again and then I just decide when I want a picture or whether I want the title so I'm just going to call this videos so that's the name appear on my button this was what it look like you see the preview on the left next again now I could give this a special name this is for the code that goes behind to make it work I'm just going to leave us command 1 for now that'll be okay and hit finish so now if I come out of design view back into normal view this is what my form looks like and hopefully if I click on the button it opens up my the form for me so now on this form I haven't actually got anything on there so I haven't got a button to close the form or to move through the records or create new records right like that so what I could do now is on this form I could go into the design view of it and on this one I could add some buttons in to do other things so perhaps I could add a button and when I draw my button this time I'm going to tell it to do a record operation I saw a record navigation and I'll say go to the next one so if I go to the next record you can see I can either have one with an arrow or I could choose a word for it I'm going to leave it with a picture let's see a writer I'm going to go for that one so next and I hit finish now this time if I go back to my normal view you can see now every time I click this button it moves one more record along now in exactly the same way I could create buttons to make it go to the previous record one that will add a record when it'll delete a record and so on and you're going to get a chance to do this later on and the other thing you can put on those you can put buttons that close forms if I go back into my design view again I'll add another button in and on this button I'm going to go for let's have a look I think it's under application I'll equip the application so for my operation I'm going to close my form this time so next I'll leave it as a stop sign I think say next and finish and now I've got this other little button on there like a position these where I want afterwards just for this demo I'll show you what it looks like go back into the normal view so this time is my other button that opens and moves through the records I click on this one I haven't saved anything yet so I'm going to say yes and I need to name my form so I didn't name my main menu so I'm going to name that now say ok and you'll see now what happened so you know this is my main menu for I click on there to open up my videos for I can click through my records and if I close this one it closes the form down so those are all the things you need to know to get all your forms up and running nicely obviously you can put buttons on that will do print previews of reports you can have buttons that launch search screens run queries is up to you what you do but you want to make this as user friendly as you can the last thing we want to do is to basically make it so that when we open the database we automatically see this main menu form that this one opens first so to do that I'm going to go into the file menu I'm going to choose options and when options open I go into the one that says current database which is on here current database and it says display formulas it says none at the moment so if I choose my drop-down arrow I can choose my main menu form click OK say ok now the next time I close this database and opener again it will automatically open with my main menu first so it makes it much easier for the user to use ok good luck

Channel: Loreto College Coorparoo

Views: 874,481

Keywords: Database, Access

Id: bqs8LIgKZTA

Length: 5min 25sec (325 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2013