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Language: en

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Creating a form can save you a lot of time
in the long run because it makes it easier

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to input the data into one or more tables.

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And in this video, we're just going to go
over the basics of creating a form from a

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table, adding additional fields, and inserting
a drop-down menu into the form.

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In the Navigation pane, you'll need to select
the table that you want to use.

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And you don't need to open it—just make
sure that the name is highlighted.

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I'm using the Customers table.

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Then in the Create tab… you can click the
Form command… and it will create a new form

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that contains all of the fields from your
table.

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Before you do anything else, you should save
this form.

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I'll call it Customers Form.

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Sometimes your form will include a subform.

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Access will create one of these if your table
is linked to another table.

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For example, here, our Customers table is
linked to the Orders table.

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So this subform will include a list of any
orders that the customer has placed.

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In many cases, this may be useful.

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But if you don't need the subform, you can
delete it by just clicking on it… and pressing

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the Delete key.

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Now if we later decided to add a field to
the Customers table, it would not appear automatically

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in this form, so we would need to add it manually.

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To do this, you can select Add Existing Fields
from the Design tab… and this will open

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up the Field List, which shows all of the
fields from this table.

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You can just double-click a field to add it
to the form.

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Or, if you want to add a field from a different
table, click Show all tables… and then locate

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the table and field that you want.

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But for now, we have all of the fields that
we need, so I'm just going to close this pane.

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With some fields, you may want to add a drop-down
menu, which Access calls a combo box.

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This can make the form easier to use because
the user can just click on the value that

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they want.

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I'm going to create a combo box for the Add
to Mailing List field.

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In the Design tab, find the Controls group…
and select the Combo Box command.

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Then you can just click on the form where
you want it to go.

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The Combo Box Wizard will open up.

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And if you have a long list of values, you
can click the first option to pull the values

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from a table or a query.

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But I'm going to select the second option,
so that I can type in the exact values that

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I want.

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Here you can type in each value… and in
most cases, you'll just use the first column.

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I'm typing three different values, and I'm
pressing the tab key after each one to go

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to the next row.

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And if you need to, you can adjust the width
of the column.

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And then click Next.

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Now this next step is very important.

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When the user chooses a value from the combo
box, we want the value to be stored in the

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Customers table.

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We'll need to select the second option…
and pick the field that we want.

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In this case, our combo box is going to be
asking about the mailing list, so I'll choose

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the Add to Mailing List field.

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And then in the last step, you can type a
label.

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I'm going to call it "Add to Mailing List?"

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And click Finish.

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The combo box will appear here.

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And we don't need the original field anymore,
so we can delete it.

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To test the combo box, we can switch to Form
view… and you can see that our three options

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appear here.

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So now we have a working form, and in the
next couple of videos we're going to make

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some more adjustments to it to make it better
suit our needs.