Keeping Your Report Tidy
The wizard has produced for you a pristine looking report, but users will often later make
requests that extra fields be added or existing fields be relocated. As a result, your tidy report
can start looking rather messy and suddenly things do not quite line up correctly.
You will also find that it is quite difficult when dragging and sizing controls on the form to
get the alignment and size uniform. Because of this, frequently you end up with two text
boxes, one of which is slightly taller than the other.
Although this is very much cosmetic, users tend to home in on this kind of thing and
expect all the controls to be nicely aligned and uniformly sized!
Fortunately, Microsoft provided some tools to help you with this.
View the form in Design View. Select all the controls you want to set to a uniform size and
alignment by dragging a box across them with your mouse. Check that only the controls that
you want to resize are selected. They will all be shown with a colored outline and handles.116 Microsoft Access 2010 VBA Macro Programming
Figure 9-8 A simple report based on orders and products