How to create a Microsoft Access Switchboard

in this video we're going to create a very simple control panel or switchboard for our application and it's very very easy to do all you have to do is go to create and we just want to go for a blank form at the top left here we want to change the view click on the little down arrow and change it to design view okay so let's go up to title we'll click on that and we'll just type in switchboard and hit enter now the first thing I'm going to do is add a command button on here which whenever we click it it will open up the clients form so it's very simple we go out to button here make sure before you do that that use control wizards is selected if it looks like that you need to click it so it's you can see it's selected there so then we go to button I'm just going to drag out a button here and it's asking us here what action do you want to happen when the button is pressed in this case we want to choose form operations because we want to open this form and here we go we choose open form and click Next what form would you like the command button to open we only have frm clients in our database at the moment so let's just choose that one let's highlight it anyway click Next and we've got a choice here open the form and find specific data to display or to show all the records and we just want to show all the records in this instance click Next now do you want text or a picture on the button I recommend you choose text and change that to clients and you can see over here what it would look like click Next now whenever you create a button I recommend you call it CMD which stands for command or command button and in this case we'll just do clients click finish and there we have our button so let's look at the form view and you can see we've got a very very simple switchboard here now if I click clients is open up the clients form so I'm going to close that down with a switchboard we don't really want to have this here which is normally for selecting a record we don't we're not displaying any records on this form so I'm going to recommend we get rid of that we don't want it to have this record navigation down here or a scroll bar so those items will remove now so up here go to design view and we need to bring up the properties of this form now the way you can do that is double click this square up here and over to the right here we can see all the properties of the entire form we want to change the format so what we got down here what you need to remove first of all is the navigation buttons so we're going to change that click in there change it from yes to no there is a shortcut you can just double click it you know toggle backwards and forwards next we want to remove the scroll bars which is down here choose neither let's have a look again click on view we've still got this record selector but we've removed the record navigation in the scroll bar so let's go for that okay you can see over here record selectors we'll change that to no double click up here and you can see record selector has now gone so we've got a nice clear blank form and what I also want to put on here is an exit button that whenever you click the exit button it will actually close down not only just this database but the entire Microsoft Access application so let's go back here go to design view and once again we go up to the command button so click on there I'm going to drag out a button we need to choose the application category and there's only one actually quit application so we click Next I'm going to highlight that and just type in exit next CMD exits and click finish we'll test that button in a minute but first of all I want to make sure these buttons are the same size because it makes it look a little bit more tidy so I'm going to highlight these buttons the way you do that is just click anywhere over here hold the left mouse button down and drag a rectangle over these so they're both within that rectangle and then I'm going to right mouse click go down to size 1 on size to the widest and will click off there and you can see we've got two buttons though the same with looks a lot tidier and I'm going to close this form save the changes I'm going to call it frm switchboard and click ok so if I double-click on from switchboard whenever I click exit it will close down the application so let's test this now first of all click clients you can view the clients form close that down click exit you can see it's closed down Microsoft Access and that's how you create a very simple switchboard let's improve this switchboard slightly I'm going to click on switchboard right mouse click and go to design view would like to do this button here says clients and that will open up the clients form but I also like to add a button that opens up the clients report so if I also call that client it's going to be confusing so instead I'm going to actually edit this and call it clients form so click on there click to the right of where it says clients space form and hit enter notice it's changed it's not wide enough so it's not displaying it so I'm going to drag it out to a reasonable size we can see all the text there next I'm going to create a command button that will open up this report over here so make sure that's selected click button and drag out for roughly the same size report operations open report click Next so anyone report there click Next clients report next C and D clients report and click finish let's just drag these out of it here so we've got a bit more space I'm going to highlight them all click over here drag across right mouse click size to widest next thing we want to do is line them up so the left edges are in the line so right mouse click align to left that looks a bit better so I'm going to go to form view and click on clients report and you can see it's opened up the clients report if I go back to switch port and click clients form sopin up the clients form and we know if we click exit it will close the application down so now you can see if you've got several clients several forms or reports you can start creating a switchboard which will be very useful if you're using an application frequently and you always go into the clients for more clients report or if you've got other people using the database because it creates say an application that people can use without having to go over here and maybe not know quite what each of these things do

Channel: JonAWF

Views: 158,837

Rating: 4.757576 out of 5

Keywords: microsoft, access, form, database, switchboard

Id: MU4faNY3IZQ

Length: 11min 5sec (665 seconds)

Published: Tue May 24 2011