Dynamic Form Formatting - Discussion of method

[ahmun]

I have a data entry form I'm building, and it consists of two parts:

Main Form - Employee Information - linked to tblEmployee
Sub Form - Employee Training Info - linked to tblTraining

A supervisor can either enter info for a new employee, and then continue to add training info, or select an existing employee and enter additional training info.

They want this form to have EVERYTHING on it... but that would be too cluttered.

I was thinking of splitting this form into two halves. the top half for employee info entry, and the bottom half for training info entry. I want to make the option available for users to click a button and hide some of the info in the Employee entry part(kind of like a hide/expand option that Windows loves to do in some of their dialog boxes with the "details" button), thus hiding info not relevant to entering traiing info. This would then make more room on the form for data entry of training info.

Does access have an efficient way to handle this? or should I just create 2 forms?

bottom line is that my employer wants it all... entry for employee info and training info... on one form. And looking at the screen sizes of some of the potential users, that will be quite cluttered!

 

[peachmelba]

ahmun

Try using Tab Control. This is a good way of easily maximising space on a form.

Regs

Peachmelba

 

[TomIII]

Another option would be to create two buttons, one for Employee Info and one for Training Info. Set cmdTraining enabled property to "True" and cmdEmployee enabled to "False".

Then, create your text boxes, labels, etc. on the form for everything that you want ultimately to be available. Set the visible properties on all of the Training fields, etc. to "False" and the Employee info to "True".

You can then use your buttons to alternatively set the visible property for the data objects and the enabled property for the buttons for "True" or "False" accordingly for each set using a very little bit of VBA code (or a macro, I think).

Once you get it all working, you can layer the various items on top of one another in the positions you want them to show up.

It looks sloppy in design and is not very elegant, but it works.

Regards

 

[ahmun]

TomIII

thanks for the tip...
That's what I ended up doing. s-) Earnie Eng
Newbie Access Programmer/DBA

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