When you're creating a form, Access allows you to
make some very detailed changes
using the Property Sheet.
To open the Property Sheet, first make sure that
you're in Layout view,
and then in the Design tab, select the Property Sheet command.
There are several tabs that you can choose from.
On each row, you'll see the property name on the
left, and the value on the right.
Sometimes, you'll need to type the new value that
you want,
but some properties have one or more buttons that you can click to choose a value.
You should always pay close attention when you're
making changes.
Since there are so many options, it may be difficult to remember exactly what you've
changed,
and what the original values were.
But if you don't remember what each property does,
you can just click on it
and then a brief description will appear in the
bottom-left corner of the screen.
This property controls the vertical position of
the object, relative to the top of the form.
In this form, I'd like to hide the ID field.
I'll select it, and then in the Property Sheet I'll go to the Format tab.
And then find the property that says 'Visible'.
Right now it's set to Yes,
but you can click on it and then use the drop-down menu to change it to no.
We can switch to Form view to test it.
And this field is now invisible.
At any time, if we want to make it visible again,
we could go back to the Property Sheet and change it.
Now I'd also like to modify the Orders form.
I'll first switch to Layout view.
In this form, I'd like the Pickup Date field to
default to the current date
whenever we create a new order.
I'll select the field, and then in the Property Sheet I'll click the Data tab,
and then find the Default Value property.
In order to get the current date, we'll need to
add an expression.
Click this button to open up the Expression Builder.
In the lower left, there is a box called Expression Elements.
There are several different options, and click on
the one that says Common Expressions.
And then to the right, we can choose either Current Date, or Current Date and Time.
We'll just choose the first one.
To the right of that, double-click Date, and it
will appear in the area above.
Then, when you click OK, the expression will appear in the Property Sheet.
We can now close this.
And let's switch to Form view so we can test it.
When we create a new order, it clears all of the
fields,
but the Pickup Date field will default to the current date.
We can still change it if we want to,
but for most orders we're probably not going to need to,
and that's definitely going to save time in the long run.
In the next video we're going to finish the Customers form
by making some adjustments to the layout and the formatting.