“Controls” menu

When we create “Forms” and/or “Reports”, we often select “controls”, align and adjust the necessary space between the “controls”.   In this lesson we will discuss how we can do all this.

Before we do this, we must first know how a “control” should be selected.

To “control” option, we click once on the control.

Then small black bars appear around the “control”, this is how we can see which “control” is selected.

To select several “controls”, first click”control”, and keep it pressed, press the shift key on our keyboard and click on every other “control” that you want to select. When you have selected everything you want, release the “Shift” key.

Delete “Controls”

To remove “Controls”, we select the “Controls” and click the “Delete” button on our keyboard.

Move and adjust “Controls”

We may sometimes need to adjust the size of the “controls” because we can not read all the data we have from our table.

To do this we select the “Control”. You will see 7 small cubes appear if you’re using the mouse pointer over a block slide, you see that it changes to a two-way arrow:

click and drag to the desired height or width.

You can also move by first selecting “controls” and then using the mouse pointer to the edge of the “control” to desinate it when it turns into a “hand”.
Click and drag to the desired location.

You can see that both parts (the name and details) of the “control” will be moved.

If you want to move only part of the “control”, then place your mouse pointer over the big black square (mouse pointer changes to a hand with finger) on the field you want to move, click and drag to the desired location.

If you wish to move the “controls” only a little, you can do this with the left, right, top and bottom arrows on your keyboard.
You can even move more precisely by holding down the “Ctrl” button on your keyboard while the pressing arrow keys.

Aligning “Controls”

In most forms, you will see the “controls” align in columns or rows.
Maybe you want to classify the forms in different sections.
In both cases, select the “controls” you want to align, and click the “Format” on the menu bar and choose “Align”.
A menu appears where you must choose which type of alignment you want.

You can also set the space between the “controls”.
To adjust the space between the “controls”, click Format on the menubar and choose “Horizontal Spacing” or ” Verical Spacing”.
And choose an option from the submenu that appears.

You can also set the size of the selected “controls” to adjust to the height or width of the largest or smallest “control”.
To do this, select the desired “controls”, click on “Format” in the menu bar, select “Size” and choose the longest, smallest, shortest or widest in the submenu.

Editing (formatting) “Controls”

You can see the different “controls” in your form or report with the various buttons on the Formatting toolbar:

To format the “controls” we select first the “control (s)”, and then click the appropriate button.

“Controls” features

Each “control” that is selected has different properties that can be set.

Select the “control”, and then click “Properties” in the database toolbar or click “View” and select “Properties” from the menu bar.

This opens the “Properties” dialog.

This dialog box is divided into five tabs:

Format: Which covers all properties of the format “control.”

Data: Relates to data which is stored in the table.

Event: Which covers all programmed features that we have entered into macros (which we’ll discuss later).

Other: Which relates to various properties that are not covered in the previous tabs.

All: Which covers all properties of the control in alphabetical order.

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