The “Ribbon”

The “Ribbon” has 4 standard tabs:
“Home” – “Create” – “External Data” – “Database Tools”.

Clicking a tab gives us various groups, depending on the selected tab in the “Ribbon”.

For example, the “Home” tab has the “Views”, “Clipboard”, “Font”, “Rich Text”, “Records,” “Sort & Filter” and “Find” groups.

You can see these in the picture above.
Each group has its own command buttons,which I will explain further in the following lessons.

The “Ribbon” can not be modified or removed.

The only thing we can do with the “Ribbon” is to minimize or maximize.

Minimizing the “Ribbon” can be done in various ways.

One way is to double-click the selected tab.

A second way is to right click on any tab, command button, or group and choose “Minimize Ribbon ” the pop-up menu.

A third way and this is for those of you who like to use “hot keys”, is to click the “Ctrl” “F1” keys on your keyboard.

To maximize the “Ribbon” back to size, double-click any tab, or click the ” Ctrl “F1” keys on your keyboard.

 

When the “Ribbon” is minimized, you can still avail all command buttons in the “Ribbon”.

Simply select a different tab and all command buttons in this tab are displayed.

If you click a command button, it automatically minimizes the “Ribbon”.

Contextual tabs

Besides the regular tabs that appear when editing objects, contextual tabs appear at the end of the “Ribbon”.

As the name suggests, a contextual tab offers access to buttons that you may need, for example a table, when you are editing specific objects.

Contextual tabs are always on the far right of the “Ribbon”. The tab name, in this case “Table Tools”, appears on the title bar. This is done to make room for the (sub) tabs with the tab, which are in the same row as the standard tabs. These (sub) tabs are under the contextual tab.

The various groups that appear when a (sub) tab is selected, are all related to the object opened in our database.

The “Navigation Pane”

“Access” 2007 includes a new feature called the “Navigation Panel”.

You can use this window to perform and manage objects in a database.
For example:

• If you want to run a “Report”, you can run it from the “Navigation Panel”.
• If you have to change the layout of a “Report”, you can open the “Report” in “Design view” from the “Navigation Panel”.

 

To modify the width of the “Navigation Panel”, place your mouse pointer over the edge of the “Navigation Panel”. When it changes into a double arrow, click and drag the edge to the desired width.

To close the “Navigation Panel”, click the “Open / Close Panel” button.

To open it again, click the button again.

In the “Navigation Panel”, all objects created in the database are listed in categories. Each category is divided into groups.

Group names change depending on which category is selected, a group may have one or more database objects.

For example, if you selected the “Object Type”, then the groups “Tables”, “Queries”, “Forms” and “Reports” are displayed, only when the objects are created for those groups.
For example, if there are no reports, then this group will not be displayed in this category.

By selecting a category in the list, you can filter objects.

Thus, for example, you can view only the forms created, when you click the “Forms” button.

Save as. Pdf

In “Access” 2007, as in any “Office” 2007 application, we have the ability to store individual objects as pdf (portable document format).
To open this, first select the object (table, query, form, or report), click the “Office” button, choose “Save As” from the drop-down menu, and click PDF in the menu.
This opens the “Publish as PDF” dialog.
In this dialog, navigate to the location on your computer where you want to save the pdf file.
Give the file a name and click the “Publish” button.
If you wish to open the PDF file after saving, select the “Open file after publishing” box . By default, it is unchecked.

In the “Optimizing for:” choose “Standard” for your print quality.
When the print quality is less important than the file size, select “Minimum size”.

By clicking on the “Options” button, we determine which pages should be included to save as pdf.

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