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 different tabs that you can choose from.
And in each row, you'll see the property name on the left… and the value on the right.
Sometimes, you'll need to type in the new value that you want… but some properties
have one or more buttons that you can click to choose a value.
Now 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 a brief description will appear in the bottom-left corner of the screen.
So 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.
And at any time, if we wanted 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.
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 us some 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.