Part 1: Par t Title
The Many Faces of Microsoft Access
41
Pa rt 1: Understanding Microsoft Access
Outline from the View menu or click the Data Outline button on the toolbar. When Access
understands the relationship between the record sources, it displays the record sources as a
hierarchy. For example, in the figure you can see that Access understands that fields from the
tblFacilities table are in a grouping level above the remaining fields that display the room data.
After you place all the controls on a page, you might want to customize some of them. You do
this by opening the Properties window, which you can see in the right center of Figure 2-21.
To see the Properties window, choose the Properties command from the View menu or click
the Properties button on the toolbar. The Properties window always shows the property set-
tings for the control selected in the Data Access Page window. (The Properties window can
also display the properties for the page or any section on the page.) In the example shown in
Figure 2-21, I clicked the text box named FacilityName to select it. If you click this text box
and select the Data tab or the All tab in the Properties window, you can see that the Control-
Source property specifies that the FacilityName field provides the data that the data access
page will display in the FacilityName control. You can also specify complex formulas that cal-
culate additional data for page controls.
You might have noticed that Access made available some additional list boxes and buttons on
the Formatting toolbar when you selected the FacilityName control. When you click a text
box in a page in Design view, Access enables drop-down list boxes on the Formatting toolbar
that make it easy to select a font and font size. Access also enables Bold, Italic, and Underline
buttons that let you set the text properties. To the right of these buttons are three buttons that
set text alignment: Align Left, Center, and Align Right. You can also set the foreground, back-
ground, and border colors; border width; and special effects from buttons on this toolbar.
Data access pages can be even more complex than forms or reports, but building a simple
page is really quite easy. Access provides data access page wizards that you can use to auto-
matically generate a number of standard page layouts based on the table or query you choose.
You’ll find it simple to customize a page to suit your needs after the data access page wizard
has done most of the hard work. You’ll learn how to design data access pages in Chapter 27,
“Building Data Access Pages."
The Data Access Page Window in Page View
To see what the finished page looks like, click the View button (shown in Figure 2-21) on the
toolbar when you’re in the Data Access Page window in Design view. From the Database win-
dow, you can also select the page name and then click the Open button, or right-click the
page name and choose Web Page Preview from the shortcut menu. Figure 2-22 on the next
page shows a Data Access Page window in Page view.
You can experiment with this page to see how it works. Use the buttons on the Facilities nav-
igation bar to move to the facility you want. Use the buttons on the Rooms navigation bar to
see the rooms defined for the selected facility in groups of five. Note that you can also click in
the facility name and then click options on the Facilities navigation bar to sort or filter what
you see.
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