Goodwill Community Foundation creating
opportunities for a better life
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
the combo 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 form and in the
next couple of videos we're going to
make some more adjustments to it to make
it better suit our needs