- [Instructor] Hi, and welcome
back to myexcelonline.com. Today we are going to go over how to create a dashboard or a main menu inside of Microsoft Access. If you want to learn more about
Microsoft Excel and Office, join our Academy Online course and access more than 1000
video training tutorials, so that you can advance your level and get the promotions,
pay raises, or new jobs. The link to join our Academy Online course is in the description. Right here, I have a
Microsoft Access database. And in this database I have a table for storing information about my videos. And I also have a form for entering data into that table about my videos. If you'd like, you can download our sample
file of this database and follow along with us. If I double click on the
form, it's very, very basic, I can just put in my basic information, the video name, the link, the category, and the video's ranking. But what if I knew I was
going to expand this database and have lots of different
options that I can do in here besides just enter my data? If I was going to have
lots of user interaction, I would probably want a main menu inside of this access database. So how do I go about creating that? Well, I'm going to close this one, and go up to Create,
and go to Form Design. And on this form I am going
to create some buttons. So if I go up to Form Design, right here I can select a button. So I'm just going to click and
drag over here to the right. And I can see I've added a new button. And I'm going to cancel outta here, and name my button cmdEnterVideos. And then I want my caption
to be Enter videos. And over here in my event, I'm going to click these
three dots next to On Click. And before I do that, note right here that the name of my form is frmVideos. So when I click these three buttons, I can go to Code Builder. And I'm just going to tab
over and do docmd.openform, with a space, and a
double quote, frmVideos. And I wanna be able to add a new video, so I'm just going to put a
comma, and another comma, and one more comma, and
then one more after that, and I'm going to select acFormAdd, because I want to open up
that form to a new record. So I'm just going to
hit Tab to select that. Close the window up here. And now I'm back on my form. Now I may or may not like
the way this button looks. Let's say I would like to go with a theme that was a little more green, because that is the
color of MyExcelOnline. So if I were to want to do that, I'm going to click the
Details section right here. And I can go under All. And right here on Back Color, I'm going to select these three dots. And let's go with a light green like this. And that kinda clashes with my button, so I'm going to click on my button, go over to Format, and
go to Shape Effects. And I can do several different
effects on my button, but let's go down to this bevel one, and make it just look a
little more professional, so I'm going to pick this one. And then for my Shape Fill, let's just make this a little bit darker than the green that is on the screen. So let's pick the darkest green down here. And then over here for the text,
let's just pick like white. And we can even make that bold. So now if you look at my button, you can see that I've added some shape, and some different color to that. Now obviously you can change this to be whatever color you want, I'm just trying to give
you a quick tutorial. Another thing that's nice on your form, is if I go over to Form Design, and I go to Insert Image, and Browse, I can pick my logo right here. So I'm going to, again, click
with my left mouse button and drag down to the right. And I've now put my logo on the screen. I can put this wherever I want, and I can move my buttons around. So let's say I would like
to start this up here, and have my buttons going up and down the right side of the screen. I can also click that
button and go to Home, and make the font bigger. So let's say 16. And then go back to my form. I can move my button to the
top, because I can anticipate that I'm going to have
many buttons down here. If you are liking this video, please give us a thumbs up
and subscribe to our channel, and hit the bell button to get notified when we release our weekly videos. I can also click this button
and do Control C, control V, and make a copy of that exact button. And I'm gonna call this one cmdExit. And for the caption on here,
I'm going to put Exit Database. And under the event, I'm
going to go back to On Click, click the three dots, choose Code Builder. I double clicked on that. Indent, and go docmd.quit. And that will allow me to
exit my access database. So let's close this screen. And let's check out what we have so far. So if I right-click here,
I can go to Form View. And this is looking a little better, but, I don't really want this bar up the side, and I don't really want
these record selectors. So let me show you
where to turn those off. If I right-click here,
I can go back to Design. And I'm going to click
this square right here, because this square here
gives me all of my options for this form. I could also use this dropdown
box and go straight to form. So if I click the All
tab, and I look down here, I can see navigation buttons. So let's turn those
off, or make it say No. Same with the record selectors. So if I right-click here,
and I go to Form View, I can now see that this is looking a little more like a dashboard. But look up here, this says Form1. Let's change the caption on here. So if I right-click and go back to Design. I can click this square, or, this time, let's go to the dropdown
and just pick Form. And for the caption, I can just say My Excel
Online Video Database. So now if I right-click
and go to Form View. I can see that that caption
up here has been changed. So a couple more things to keep in mind. You can still see the
navigation bar over here. If I want to hide this
when I open the database, I can go up here to File,
and go down to Options. I can select Current Database,
and I can scroll down, and take off this checkbox
for Display Navigation Pane. On this screen, I can also scroll up, and choose the form that I want to display when the database first opens. If I go right now, I only
have the Videos form. And that's because I
haven't saved this form yet. So let's say OK to this. And you'll get a notification that this isn't going to take place until you close and
open the database again. So just say OK to that. And then go up here to the Save icon. And let's save this as frmMainMenu. And say OK. Now I can go again to File,
Options, Current Database. And this time the display form
for the main menu is there. So I'm going to select that and say OK. And again, I get the warning that this will happen the
next time I open the database. And I will say OK. So now if I go to File, Close. And then if I go to File. And I can see my dashboard
database right here. If I click that, I can see
that my database has now opened without showing the navigation
pane over here on the left, and also just showing the
form that I wanted it to show. So now I can click here and enter videos. And you can see that these are being entered
into data entry mode, where I'm just adding a new record. So if I close out of there,
you're probably thinking that you'll wanna be able
to see all the videos that are are in the database. So I could create another button
that says View All Videos, or Search Videos, or wherever
you wanna go with this. But for now, I just wanted to show you that you could create
a very simple dashboard rather quickly inside of Microsoft Access. So if I hit Exit Database,
Access will close out completely. So hopefully that gives
you a quick introduction to how you can create a quick dashboard inside of Microsoft Access. We are going to have an upcoming series on many more things that you can do inside of Microsoft
Access, so watch for those. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below
and we'll get back to you. Thanks for watching, and
see you again next time. If you want to learn more about
Microsoft Excel and Office, join our Academy Online Course, and access more than 1000
video training tutorials so that you can advance your level, and get the promotions,
pay raises, or new jobs. The link to join our academy online course is in the description. - If you like this video,
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