Part I: Access Building Blocks
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l (^) PivotChart view: PivotChart view lets you display a form’s data as pivot charts.
l Layout view: Layout view lets you change the form’s design while viewing data.
l (^) Design view: Design View permits you to make changes to the form’s design.
Note
All these commands may not be available on all forms. By setting the form’s properties, you can limit which
views are available. You’ll learn more about form properties in the “Working with Form Properties” section,
later in this chapter.
The Clipboard group
The Clipboard group contains the Cut, Copy, Paste, and Format Paint commands. These com-
mands work like the same commands in other applications (like Word and Excel). The Clipboard
is a resource provided by Windows and is shared by virtually all Windows applications. Items you
copy or cut from Excel, for example, can be pasted into Access if the context is appropriate. For
example, you could copy a VBA procedure from an Excel worksheet and paste it into an Access
VBA code module because the contexts are the same. But you could not copy an Excel spreadsheet
and paste it into Access, because Access has no way of working with an Excel spreadsheet.
The Paste command’s down arrow gives you three choices:
l Paste: The Paste button inserts whatever item has been copied to the Windows Clipboard
into the current location in Access. Depending on the task you’re working on, the pasted
item might be plain text, a control, a table or form, or some other object.
l (^) Paste Special: Paste Special gives you the option of pasting the contents of the Clipboard
in different formats (Text, CSV, Records, and so on).
l (^) Paste Append: Paste Append pastes the contents of the Clipboard as a new record — as
long as a record with a similar structure was copied to the Clipboard. Obviously, Paste
Append remains disabled for any operation that does not involve copying and pasting a
database table record.
The other controls in the Clipboard ribbon group include
l Cut: The Cut operation removes the item from its current place in the application, and
puts it onto the Windows Clipboard. The item is not destroyed by removing it from its
current location, but it must be pasted before a second item is copied to the Clipboard
because a cut or copied item overwrites whatever is on the Clipboard.
l Copy: Whatever item or object that currently has the focus is copied to the Clipboard. Copy
can be applied to plain text, but it also applies to controls on a form or report (with the form or
report in Design view, of course), database records, entire tables, queries, and other database
objects, and so on. The Windows Clipboard accepts virtually anything that is copied to it.
l Format Painter: The Format Painter (the icon that looks like a brush or paint brush) is a
special tool to use when working with Access forms and reports in Design view. The con-
cept of Format Painter is quite simple: You copy the format of an item (such as its font set-
tings) and paint the formatting onto another item.