Chapter 19: Advanced Access Form Techniques
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FIGURE 19.9The Format Painter makes it easy to “paint” the appearance of a control onto other controls on a form.
Offering more end-user help
Beginning with Office 4.x all Microsoft products have featured tooltip help — those little yellow
notes that appear when you hold the mouse cursor over a control or button. (Microsoft calls these
prompts control tip help.)You add tooltips to Access forms by adding the help text to the control’s ControlTip Text
property (see Figure 19.10). By default the text in a tooltip doesn’t wrap, but you can add a new
line character by pressing Ctrl+Enter in the ControlTip Text property wherever you want the
break to appear.In general, you should consistently use tooltips throughout an application. After your users
become accustomed to tooltips, they expect them on all but the most obvious controls.Adding background pictures
Attractive forms are always a valuable addition to Access applications. It’s difficult to add color or
graphics to forms without obscuring the data contained on the form. Access makes it easy to add a
graphic to the background of a form, much as a watermark might appear on expensive bond
paper. The picture can contain a company logo, text, or any other graphic element. The picture is
specified by the form’s Picture property and can be embedded in the form or linked to an exter-
nal file. If the picture is linked, the graphic displayed on the form changes anytime the external file
is edited.