Resize Microsoft Access Forms for Different Screen Sizes & Resolutions Using Anchoring. Zoom In/Out.

welcome to another tech help video brought to you by accesslearningzone.com I am your instructor Richard Rost in today's video I'm going to show you how to resize Microsoft Access forms for different screen sizes and resolutions using something called anchoring today's question comes from Brennan in Cork Ireland one of my Platinum members Brennan says I have three different devices that I use my database on I have my normal desktop PC in my office I have a travel laptop that's got a much smaller screen I also like to log on remotely using remote desktop software to check things from my cell phone I built three different sets of forms for each of these devices but it's a pain having to update them every time I make a change to one I've got to change all three isn't there a way you can stretch or resize forms to fit the available screen space well Brennan you'd think that Microsoft Access would allow you to stretch or zoom in and out of forms like you can in Word and Excel and PowerPoint and most other applications but you can't do it in Microsoft Access like I always say access is literally the red-headed stepchild of the Microsoft Office family I mean they even made the logo red they used to be purple now it's red and access doesn't get a lot of the cool features that most of the other office applications have but we can get creative and do stuff our way because you can do pretty much anything in Access so let me show you a trick called anchoring that you can use to resize your forms and have the controls stretch inside your forms and later on we'll talk a little bit about zooming in and out okay here I am in my tech help free template this is a free database you can download a copy off my website if you'd like to and if you have not yet watched the video where I show you how I build this template go watch that first so you understand how this database is built it's free it's on my website it's on my YouTube channel there's a link I'll also put a link Down Below in the description you can click on to go watch this so go watch this and come back if you haven't already okay so when I open a form like the customer form if I stretch the form everything in the form stays put it doesn't move all right it'd be nice if I can stretch this guy out maybe have these fields get a little bit larger especially the notes field right so if you're on a bigger screen you can stretch it out and see more stuff on the screen now in Access forms there's something called anchoring and by default Everything Is Anchored to the top left corner of the form so this control this control this box these buttons they're anchored to their position that you set them in relative to the upper left corner of the form but you can change that anchoring which will allow them to move around so let's go into design view now just to keep things simple I'm going to delete this second column of stuff and I'm going to delete this and these fields here just for now just to keep things simple and basic I want everything to be pretty standard in uniform I'll show you some more tricks and techniques in a little bit okay let's move these guys over here like that and Shrink this in like so okay now keep in mind everything is still anchored in the upper left hand corner let me save this Ctrl s close that down open it all right our form got a little simpler now if I resize it you can see everything still stays put now let's say I want to put one of these buttons down here in the bottom right corner and if I move the form boundary I want that button to stay with it so what I want to do is I'm going to Anchor the order button to the bottom right corner of the form let's see how we do that go to design view now we're going to use a tab up here that I almost never use the arrange tab and I went through and I checked I have not covered this in any of my classes because when I recorded my initial beginner Series this feature didn't exist yet and after they added it I was already well into the developer material and I never went back and covered it so I'm covering this for the first time for you guys I'm going to sneak it into my beginner series somewhere I'm re-recording the beginner Series right now but anyways here's the arrange tab now these guys are mostly grayed out until you select something so let's select the order button and notice how this stuff lights up okay I'm going to slide the order button down let's let's put it down here in the bottom right corner like right there okay sit it nice and pretty right there click on it now here's anchoring all right drop that down and you can see there's a bunch of different options in here top left is the default everything by default is top left let's pick bottom right and see what happens bottom right okay now we're going to save our form we're going to close it and open it back up again now watch this resize the form look at that the button is anchored to the bottom right corner of this form so as this form resizes that button is going to stay there and yeah you might hide it accidentally if you do something like this but you can do that with all the fields all right so as you make this guy bigger bigger it moves with the bottom right corner let's do the same thing with the other one take the contacts button slide it down here right arrange anchor bottom right okay save it close it open it up and now both of those guys will move with the bottom right corner see that pretty cool okay so let's take these guys now and let's slide them under here there's orders and there's contact okay like that now keep in mind they're still anchored bottom right so if I move this now it's going to look like that which is okay all right but what about these text boxes now I want the text boxes to stay anchored to the upper left but if I resize this form horizontally I'd like these guys to stretch more to the right that'd be kind of cool right I could see more data in each of these fields how do we do that well let's go back to design view let's select all of these okay just the text boxes not the labels go to arrange go to anchoring now we're going to pick stretch across top okay now they still stay anchored in the upper left corner but save it close it open it back up again now watch what happens if I slide this to the right look at that they stretch across the top okay that's pretty cool right let's see what the other options do design view again select these guys go to anchoring all right stretch down and across save that close it this is what you do if you want them to also resize vertically see that now they're going to overlap each other so usually you'll only do that with like one field I'll give you had a notes field on the bottom of that so we don't want that option and the other option for stretching here all right arrange anchoring stretch across the bottom save it close it open it what that does is it anchors them to the bottom so they'll slide down okay you could do that if you had like a a couple of fields below your notes field that was in the middle for example okay so for these guys I'm going to do anchor I keep wanting to go over here but remember to click on arrange first anchoring stretch across top okay and remember there is no turning anchoring off anchoring is always on it's just the default is the upper left corner okay okay let's add city and state back in whoops clicked on that too soon let's add sit era add State and zip code back in here I'm going to slide the city let me make it a little smaller like that all right let's go back to our existing Fields let's find state and zip code and bring those guys back to the party I'm going to delete the labels that they come in with slide state right there and we'll put the ZIP code right next to it like we did before okay there we go all right save it close it open it back up again and they're not quite exactly in the right spots where I want them let me design that again yeah they're not uh not quite snapped to the grid right click and then size to grid there we go all right save it close it open it back up okay now see that they came in a little bit from the left that's because of the anchoring now these guys are sitting right where you left them but look the the city behind it is stretching so we don't want that what I want though is I want the state and zip code to move to the right all right stay your current size but move to the right if I resize so the city field can get bigger but these guys don't want to stay the same size all right so how do we do that so we're going to set select these two guys okay and then for their anchoring we're going to set them to top right so they're anchored to the top right corner and they'll move but they won't resize okay save that close it open it back up again and now resize and see that these guys are anchored to the top right corner so as the right side moves they move okay but they won't go down okay let's bring back our notes field and this time let's do this with the notes field Let's uh let's set all these guys back to default anchorings we're going to go back in here go to anchoring top left set them back where they were supposed to be okay let's bring our notes field back in add existing fields and then notes is right there I'll get rid of you I'll slide you up here maybe bring that down like so let's bring these buttons back over this way find this like that and of course we'll give our notes a little splash of color okay save it close it open it up here's what we got very similar to the original one except I still got these guys floating down now let's make this notes field get bigger as the form gets bigger okay design view click on notes arrange anchoring stretched down and across so it can go downwards and to the right which is what you'd want for a notes field all right save it close it open it back up again and now look your notes field can get as big as you want it to be to fit that screen okay see how that works or you can also do something similar to what I did in the title slide here I put the notes field below these guys if you want these text boxes to also slide open to the right you can do that put the notes field down here okay and then also anchor it so it slides down into the right okay that would just be something like this you just take your notes field and you can start these off small I recommend make your form as small let's do it like this let's put this over here make it as small as it needs to be to fit your smallest screen right and then you can always resize it and make it larger for bigger screens like so if this is your small guy right fit this so it fits maybe on your cell phone okay save this and now when you open it up if you want to make it bigger it gets bigger okay and you can also apply that anchoring back on these guys right this one actually let's select these and then I'm going to hold down the shift click click okay these guys were anchoring stretch across top and these two are anchoring top right save it close it and now this is what your form will do see these guys slide to the right these guys all resize as well as the notes field that's the beauty of anchoring now this is one of the rare exceptions where I actually think if you're going to do stuff like this and you want the screens to automatically resize you can use the tabbed interface that I I really I hate using it I almost never use it but the tabs they start forms maximize like this and you got tabs across the top if you like that go ahead and use it I personally don't but what you could do if you want this form to open maximized or any form really it's one line of VBA code just one it's due command to maximize you want me to show it to you you ready for the bonus round you ready for some bonus material okay I'll show you how to do it now if you've never done any VBA programming before go watch this video it's about 20 minutes long it's intro to VBA teaches you all the basics everything you need to know to get started programming and VBA don't be scared of it it's easy I show you how to do everything step by step for this example we literally need one line of code but as most things I show with VBA it's one maybe two lines of code to do really cool stuff okay but you gotta know where to put that one line of code so I'm going to show you that right now okay so I want this form to maximize itself when it opens now there's two places you could put this line of code you could put it in the button that opens it if you want this button to open it and then maximize it you put the code in the button like this design view right come and turn this field list off right click on the button go to build event that opens up the code Builder okay right here is the customer form button click it's going to do command open the form and then you just say do command dot maximize that's it save it close the editor close the form alright open your main menu back up click the form and Boop it opens the form and then issues a maximize command that's pretty cool right another way to do it is let me take that out of there design view right click build event you get out of here control y see ya save it close it okay if you open the customer Forum from many different locations or even maybe even from the navigation pane itself and you don't want to have to put that maximize command in a bunch of different buttons you could tell the form itself to maximize itself once it opens and that's called the on open Event there's two events there's on open and there's on there's on load and on open two events very similar to each other there are some differences but we're not going to talk about them now so pick either one here's on open I'll use that one all right dot dot dot this is the form open Event so this is going to run every time this form opens what are you going to tell it to do do command dot maximize same thing so when you open Mr customer form maximize yourself okay save it close the editor close the form open it up again Boop and it maximizes itself and that cool all right and then we can restore it back down and close it and there you go let's take a look at one more example of anchoring let's take a look at the customer list I like anchoring a lot especially with um with list type forms like uh like a continuous form like this now the example here is kind of silly with last name so let's add let's add notes to this all right I'm actually going to make this a bit smaller and we'll slide these over like this and I kind of want to do it for something in the middle of the list so let's um let's actually slide these guys over a bit like that and I'm going to copy this copy paste and slide these guys let's put this over here and put this right there okay and uh we're gonna make this say no so we're gonna put the notes right in the center here all right we're going to change this guy here so that this is notes the control oop the control sources notes and don't forget to change the name okay all right save it close it close it open it up all right so we got our notes in the middle here and we got somebody with long notes in here we don't have any long notes in here let's put some low notes in here let's open up Deanna and I'll just copy some stuff off my website and paste it in there okay got a lot a lot of notes in there for Deanna okay all right let's close that and we'll close that okay that's the thing with maximize by the way once you maximize a form it stays maximized and if you close that form the other forms that were open are also maximized you can make your own buttons like on the bottom down here to navigate through them I personally hate tabs I just don't like tabs if I'm going to do a database like this I'll build buttons across the form footer to make to navigate across whatever forms I want to go to because usually from one form you want to go to a bunch of different places not you don't want to have buttons for all of your different forms open and I hate it when I've got 15 tabs open across the top okay but anyways what I'm trying to do is I want to I want to have it so that these guys stay on the left these guys stay on the right and this column here right notes stretches so design view all right we're going to select these guys anchoring stretch across top these guys anchoring top right okay let's just make sure these are sized right let's okay all right good ready save it close it open it up looks good and now we resize and ooh ah Isn't that cool okay that's the benefit of anchoring and with continuous forms you just as you go get bigger you just see more records They don't really have to worry about that okay okay now I mentioned earlier that we would talk about actually zooming in and out of these forms now the anchoring technique that I showed you works well but it doesn't actually make the fields any bigger as far as the font size and their vertical size for regular you know single line text boxes so if you're working on a bigger display and you want the text to actually get bigger all right like your first name last name fields you have to actually zoom in and out so you need to zoom in and out features for your forms like this now this is something that does involve a little more VBA programming and I am going to cover how to do it in the Extended Cut for the members I'm going to show you how to make a couple of buttons on any form that you can click on them and make the form bigger or smaller it'll resize the controls on the form and it'll make the font sizes larger and smaller as well and so if you've got something like the customer list form you can zoom in to the actual form itself and make the fields and the text in those fields bigger so if you got people who have a hard time seeing some of the stuff on those really really small forms you can zoom in or you can zoom out we can make them smaller all right either way so again that's covered in the Extended Cut for silver members and up I would also like to give honorable mention to the shrinker stretcher by Peter's software when I was doing my research for this video I came across this and I actually downloaded his trial and gave it a shot and it works really well so if you don't want to have to bother with programming this yourself he's got some stuff you can just drop into your database and it you can just stretch stuff here's a screenshot right here right it just it just works you don't have any programming to do if you don't want to mess with it you just want to be able to stretch your forms I would strongly recommend getting Peter's software's shrinker stretcher I will put a link to this down below in the description below the video check it out you can download a free copy and test it and see if it works yourself and it's not that expensive to buy a copy of the actual software itself yeah he's charging like 39 bucks it's a steal or if you want to learn how to do it yourself using some VB code you can come and become a member and check out the Extended Cut well I almost forgot to mention one of the nice things about shrinker stretcher is that Peter's software uh it'll automatically adjust based on the resolution of your monitor too all right so if you load up the database and it's easy you're on a big screen it'll automatically stretch the form for you mine does and I'm just going to show you how to make a little zoom in zoom out buttons so you have to do it manually but his will yeah and I yeah I could figure out how to do that I toyed around a little bit but it's a lot of work I would rather just use Peter software myself if that's what you want you want to automatically stretch the size of your screen also I do want to mention I just released a template myself where you could set up different form profiles for the different forms in your database based on screen size so for example you can set up this the same form but you can have a large screen version a regular version and like a cell phone version of the same form they're just different profiles so if you're interested in that check out this video I'll walk you through it explain how it works and it's pretty cool so that's your Tech help for today I hope you learned something I hope this helped somebody come and check out the Extended Cut for the silver members and up and remember silver members and up get access to all of my Extended Cut videos there's hundreds of them now and gold members and above can download these databases plus Gold members get access to the code Vault with lots of cool stuff in it so sign up become a member today I'm Richard Ross and I'll see you next time how do you become a member click on the join button below the video after you click the join button you'll see a list of all the different membership levels that are available each with its own special perks silver members and up will get access to all of my Extended Cut Tech help videos one free beginner class each month and more Gold members get access to download all of the sample databases that I build in my tech help videos plus my code Vault where I keep tons of different functions that I use you'll also get a higher priority if you decide to submit any Tech help questions to me and you'll get one free expert class each month after you've finished the beginner series Platinum members get all the previous perks plus even higher priority for Tech help questions access to all of my full beginner courses for every subject and one free developer class each month after you finish the expert classes these are the full-length courses found on my website not just for access to I also teach word excel Visual Basic and lots more you can now become a diamond sponsor and have your name or company name listed on a sponsors page that will be shown in each video as long as you're a sponsor you'll get a shout out in the video and a link to your website or product in the text below 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keep these free videos coming I got puppies to feed now if you have not yet tried my free access level one course check it out now it covers all the basics of Microsoft Access it's over four hours long and I just updated it for 2021 you can find it on my website or on my YouTube channel I'll include a link below that you can click on and also if you like level one level two is just one dollar yep that's all one dollar and it's free for all members of my YouTube channel at any level even supporters want to have your question answered in a video just like this one visit my tech help page on my website you can send me your question there while you're on my site feel free to stop by the access forum lots of good conversations happening there be sure to follow my blog find me on Twitter and of course YouTube once again my name is Richard Ross thank you for watching this Tech help video brought to you by accesslearningzone.com I hope you enjoyed this video and that you learned something today I'll see you again soon foreign

Channel: Computer Learning Zone

Views: 27,445

Keywords: access 2016, access 2019, access 2021, access 365, microsoft access, ms access, ms access tutorial, #msaccess, #microsoftaccess, #help, #howto, #tutorial, #lesson, #training, #database, Access Forms using with different screen resolutions, Access Form Resizing Based on Screen Resolution, Shrinker, Stretcher, Zoom in, zoom out, zoom in access forms, zoom out access forms, automatic form resizing, form resizer, dynamically resize forms and controls, DoCmd.Maximize, multiple monitor sizes

Id: IItLb9Inw0Y

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 15 2022