Part IV: Professional Database Development
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Notice the Display Navigation Pane check box, the Allow Full Menus check box, and the Allow
Built-in Toolbars check box in the start-up dialog box in Figure 26.7. When not selected, these
check boxes hide the Navigation pane and remove the built-in menus from the Access environ-
ment. This means, of course, that your application will be totally reliant on the switchboard forms
and toolbars you create, but it’s a good way to control the user’s access to the environment.
Displaying one form at a time
If appropriate for your application, you’ll probably want to restrict the user to working with a sin-
gle form to avoid problems by allowing forms to be opened only through your switchboard. Many
inexperienced users are confused by the multiple document interface (MDI) paradigm used by
Access. Having too many forms open on the screen can lead the user to jump from task to task in
no particular order.
As an alternative to displaying a single form at a time, you can also use the Modal property to
force a form to retain the focus during some operation. A good example is selecting from a number
of reports to print. Once the user has decided to print a report, you might want to keep him
focused on that task, instead of allowing him to jump back to the data-entry form. With access to
both printing and data entry, the user might start a print job, jump back to data entry as the print
job begins (to make changes to the data), and then wonder why the printout doesn’t include the
changes made after the printing has begun. Or Access might lock the records the user is trying to
change during the print event.
Choosing the user-interface style
Early versions of Access provided only a single type of user interface — overlapping windows
view. Beginning with Access 2007, and now in Access 2010, you have the choice of using the tra-
ditional overlapping windows view or the new Tabbed Documents interface. Choose File ➪
Options to open the Access Options dialog box; select the Current Database tab; and then, under
Document Windows Options, select either Overlapping Windows or Tabbed Documents (refer to
Figure 26.7).
Choosing which user interface paradigm to use is a rather important decision because the choice
you make applies to all forms and reports in the application, with the exception of free-floating
modal dialog forms. Modal dialogs are always detached from other objects in the user interface and
stay on the screen until explicitly dismissed by the user.
Tabbed Documents
The Tabbed Documents interface is ideal for users working with more than one object (form or
report) at a time. In the Tabbed Documents interface, forms and reports can’t lie on top of one
another, unless explicitly designed to do so. You’re assured that the user can see all the controls on
a user interface object (form or report) without having to move another object out of the way.
You can, if needed, force a form or report to float on top of the Tabbed Documents interface by
setting its Popup property to True. This trick enables you to display information in the pop-up
form while the user views data on the Tabbed Documents interface.
