Microsoft Acecss 2010 : Power Control Techniques (part 2) - Selecting Form Objects

Selecting, Moving, Aligning, and Sizing Form Objects

You must know several important tricks of the trade for selecting, moving, aligning, and sizing form objects. These tips will save you hours of frustration and wasted time.

Selecting Form Objects

The manner easiest to choose a simple object on a form is to click it on. After you chose the object, you can move it, classify it, or change any of its properties. The selection of the multiple objects is a little more delicate, but you can achieve it several manners. The various methods are more effective in various situations.

It’s important to understand which objects you’ve actually selected. Figure 2 shows a form with four selected objects. The ID text box, the Company label, and the Address label and Address text box are all selected; however, the Customer ID label and CompanyName text box aren’t selected. If you look closely at the figure, you can see that the selected objects are completely surrounded by selection handles. The ID label and Company text box each has just a single selection handle because each is attached to an object that is selected. If you changed any properties of the selected objects, the ID label and Company text box would be unaffected.

Figure 2. Selecting objects on a form.

One way to select multiple objects is to hold down the Shift key and click each object you want to select. Access surrounds each selected object with selection handles, indicating that you have selected it.

You can also select objects by lassoing them. Objects to be lassoed must be adjacent to one another on the form. To lasso objects, you place the mouse pointer on a blank area of the form (that is, not over any objects) and then click and drag the mouse pointer around the objects you want to select. You can see a thin line around the objects the mouse pointer is encircling. When you let go of the mouse button, any objects that were within the lasso, including those only partially surrounded, are selected. If you want to deselect any of the selected objects to exclude them, you hold down the Shift key and click the objects you want to deselect.

One of my favorite ways to select multiple objects is to use the horizontal and vertical rulers that appear at the edges of the Form Design window. You click and drag within the ruler, and as you do this, two horizontal lines appear, indicating which objects are selected. As you click and drag across the horizontal ruler, two vertical lines appear, indicating the selection area. When you let go of the mouse button, any objects within the lines are selected. As with the process of lassoing, to remove any objects from the selection, you hold down the Shift key and click the objects you want to deselect.