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Creating and Using Forms
Watch the video! (Part 1) (3:18min) (Part 2) (6:35min) - Tips for watching our videos.
Download the example to work along with the video.
Why Use Forms?
In real life, a form is piece of paper that you fill out so that someone can collect and keep track of specific information about you. Only one record, your record, is captured with any given paper form.
Common Form
Access 2007 forms work very much the same way.
In previous lessons, you saw that you can populate a database by entering records into the tables themselves. If the database has hundreds of records and many fields to populate for any given record, a table can be overwhelming to the person entering data. An Access form lets your user enter data one record at a time, without having to see the entire table.
Access Form
An Access 2007 form also lets the person entering data know exactly what information to enter, and can even tell him what that information should look like. Adding certain control components to a form -- like a drop down menu -- can dramatically increase the integrity of the data that is held in a database.
A database owner wants to control the levels of access that other database users have to the data -- because the fewer people that are interacting with the data, the lower the chance that the data can become compromised. Corrupt data is not useful! Forms are one more way that the database owner can limit the actions of the other users. Form properties can be set so users can only enter records or only view records.