creating a forum can save you a lot of
time in the long run because it makes it
easier to input the data into one or
more tables and in this video we're just
going to go over the basics of creating
a form from a table adding additional
fields and inserting a drop down menu
into the form in the navigation pane
you'll need to select the table that you
want to use and you don't need to open
it just make sure that the name is
highlighted I'm using the customers
table then in the create tab you can
click the form command and it will
create a new form that contains all of
the fields from your table and before
you do anything else you should save
this form I'll call it customers form
sometimes your form will include a
subform access will create one of these
if your table is linked to another table
for example here our customers table is
linked to the orders table so the
subform will include a list of any
orders that the customer is placed in
many cases this may be useful but if you
don't need the subform you can delete it
by just clicking on it and pressing the
Delete key now if we later decided to
add a field to the customers table it
would not appear automatically in this
form so we would need to add it manually
to do this you can select add existing
fields from the design tab and this will
open up the field list which shows all
of the fields from this table you can
just double-click a field to add it to
the form or if you want to add a field
from a different table click show all
tables and then locate the table and
field that you want but for now we have
all of the fields that we need so I'm
just going to close this pane with some
fields you may want to add a drop-down
menu which access calls a combo box this
can make the form easier to use because
the user can just click on the value
that they want I'm going to create a
combo box for the add to mailing list
field in the design tab find the
controls group and select the combo box
command then you can just click on the
form where you want it to go
the combo box wizard will open up and if
you have a long list of values then you
can click the first option to pull the
values from a table or a query but I'm
going to select the second option so
that I can type the exact values that I
want
here you can type in each value and in
most cases you'll just use the first
column I'm typing three different values
and I'm pressing the tab key after each
one to go to the next row
and if you need to you can adjust the
width of the column
and then click Next
now this next step is very important
when the user chooses a value from the
combo box we want the value to be stored
in the customers table we'll need to
select the second option and pick the
field that we want in this case our
combo box is going to be asking about
the mailing list so I'll choose the add
to mailing list field
and then in the last step you can type a
label I'm going to call it add to
mailing list and click finish
a box will appear here and we don't need
the original field anymore so we can
delete it to test the combo box we can
switch to form view
and you can see that our three options
appear here
so now we have a working forum and in
the next couple of videos we're going to
make some more adjustments to it to make
it better suit our needs like what you
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