Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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While a major point of emphasis in Office 2007 are galleries of applied formats, we have seen their use mainly in PowerPoint and Word where you can put professional effects into charts and diagrams to make the look like they were created in a third party graphics program.

This week I want to take a look at some similar options in Access 2007 and how they can make your forms or reports look more stylish and professional.

In our introduction to Access 2007 we noted some of these features along with two other new ones — conditional formats and attachments. We also took a look at how the new Access ribbon exposes these new features and how it works with the standard Access objects — tables, forms, reports, queries and so on.

As you know forms are the way you can enable users to more easily input and review information from a database table, while reports are used mainly to distribute that information.

When you open a form from the navigation panel in Access 2007, and put it into the Design view, the Design and Arrange tabs of Form design view are active on the ribbon. In the Arrange tab you will find the AutoFormat gallery in the upper left corner.

Clicking it will open a gallery of AutoFormats that you can instantly apply to the form.

Figure 1351

Opening the form in Form view (or the new Layout view) shows you the effect of the applied format.

Figure 1352

You can also create your own form autoformat by using the AutoFormat wizard, which you can click to open under the AutoFormat gallery.

Figure 1353

Click the option to create a new form based on the current form.

Name the new form and click OK.

Figure 1354

Now you can see the newly named form in the AutoFormats Wizard. Clicking Customize brings up the option to update the currently selected form with the format in the form currently.

Figure 1355

So now, to create your new AutoFormat in the wizard, all you have to do is to customize the current form the way you like, and save those options in the newly named AutoFormat. In that way, you will have this newly created format to apply to any other form that you create in Access 2007.

The best way to customize the form is probably to use the Design tab in the Forms part of the ribbon in Design view, but the Layout view can also enable you to make some modifications and see their results a bit better in the current view.

The report you see in Layout view does not look not exactly the same as the printed report. For example, there are no page breaks in Layout view. Also, if you have used Page Setup for format your report with columns, the columns are not displayed in Layout view. However, Layout view gives you a very close approximation of the printed report. If you want to see how the report will look when printed, use Print Preview.

Certain tasks cannot be performed in Layout view, and require you to switch to Design view. In certain situations, Access will display a message telling you that you must switch to Design view to make a particular change.

In Layout view the AutoFormats are available directly in the Format tab of the Ribbon.

You are able to use this tab to also add conditional formats to accentuate values in the form (and conditional formats are also available in reports). What is nice about the Layout view is that whatever features you implement you can see the formatting results immediately in contrast to Design view, which may give you more options but you need to go back to Forms view to see how they will look.

Graphical effects in Access 2007 are not limited to reports and forms. You can also jazz up the actual datasheet view by clicking the Home tab and choosing the alternate colors options from the Font group.

Figure 1356

Applying a lightly shaded color can give you a nice banded effect for the datasheet.

Figure 1357

Figure 1358

AutoFormats are also available (along with a wizard) in the Design view of Reports in Access 2007.

If you select an area of the report in the design view of Reports, you can also open the Alternate Colors dialog box once again.

Figure 1359

In this way you can apply a nice banded effect for a report instantly with a lighter color as a background for alternate rows.

Figure 1360

In this way you can begin to make your Access objects approach the professional styles of other Office documents, so that the forms your users access to input information are more visually accessible and when you distribute reports based on your tables or queries, they also have a distinctive design.

By saving the design choices you make as AutoFormats, you can also reapply the same designs to other databases.

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