this is video one in our series on forms in databases and we're gonna be looking at microsoft access forms so first of all what is a form well a form is a way to view and edit the data particularly in a table sometimes could be in a query in a more aesthetic way so if you remember when we did tables tables look something like this where you've got a whole bunch of rows and columns and you can see all the data now when you are dealing with other people they're going to use the database they might not like this layout it might not be very user friendly to them it's also nice just to view each record individually and be able to see all that information and that's whether we want to change it or view it or even insert a new record and things like that so what we would do is we would then convert that table into a form it doesn't change the table it just means we create this other thing called a form which connects to the table so whatever we do to the form will happen to the table so if we change something in the form it'll change it in the original table and so a form looks something like this as you can see it's a lot more nicer to look at a lot more laid out you can see one record in full you can actually adjust how the date how the data is presented for example you can make the columns a bit smaller and stuff like that make it just look more appealing to the person that's going to use it so that's what we're going to be doing now with forms now before we get into forms let's just get some terminology right so we understand so over here those little blocks on the side there you see those are the labels those are called labels and they basically will display whatever the names of your fields are so whatever field so we've got first name with no space you can see that's how it is displayed there and then the boxes next to them those are called text boxes and that's where the data for those fields will be put so for each record when you move through the different records those will obviously change depending on which record you are in so let's go into access and develop our first form so here we are in access and we want to create a form so we can see we've got a whole bunch of tables with data in them i'm going to come here to the create option and you can see all the things that we've got oh there's forms now you can use all these different options i like using the form harry potter i mean the form wizard and so i'm going to click on the form visit it's going to take me through a step-by-step process of trying to find out what it is exactly that i want in my form so let's click on the form wizard and it's going to pop up boom so you can base a form off of a query or off of a table i've got a whole bunch of hidden queries there so i've got a whole bunch of them i want to base it off of the table so i'm going to go table and then i've got all the fields available to me and here i can say which fields i want to put into my form and the ones that stay here are the ones i don't want on my form so if you want all of them you can just click on the two arrows there and it puts all of them there and you actually know i don't want all these you put them all back or you can select them in the video so i want first name surname database so just add a couple of them in if you want inside so you can have those nice little forms i'm going to put in paid as well so those are if you only want specific fields to be in your form so there i've got the fields i want then i click on the next it tells me what type of layout to do i want there lots of different options available to you i'm just going to click the default one which is columns and then here we want to give it a name now remember our naming conventions we don't want to give it the same name as a table this is a form so i'm going to use the prefix frm data so that i know that this is the form and tbl data is the table and we're going to just open it so we can view the information so i'm going to click on finish and there we go we have a nice little form there so we've got a nice little layout it's all done for us obviously our first record doesn't have all the data entered so if i enter in something in here so if i just go and say hey um city is or let's say contact number we're going to give it some sort of contact number i'm just giving some random numbers if i type in here will it let me type in numbers let's try there we go my num lock wasn't gone so there we go i'm adding some random numbers there we go and then i'm gonna click save okay so there we go now if i had to go back to the table and go to this long do you see how the number has been put into the table so there we go there's a link now between the the fields here and the fields in the table so if in the bottom here you can see you can move through the different records and you can see all the data also nice and pretty and stuff like that and things like that so that that's our form that's how easy it is to make a form now if you've closed your form and you go you know what i actually want to change a few things of how it looks you can also click on the form right click on it and you can go to design view you can do that and now we can go to how it looks and you can also click over here if you're originally viewing it in the in the form view you can then change to uh design view now there's a few things i want to change first of all you'll notice that our labels are exactly like they are in the in the table and sometimes that's always not nice like date i want to say date i want changes to date of birth you can actually change these the labels you can change into whatever you want a date of birth i can change first name to first space name and things like that your contact number i'm actually going to change that to contact space number so you can make it just a little bit better to view it's not going to change the data the date that must stay the same because the date is going to go into those text boxes the labels we can do whatever we want to so those things we can do at the top here we've got the header which is what is always displayed at the top and at the bottom we have the footer now you'll notice there is no footer at the moment so you just click over here so your mouse makes like those arrows and you can drag down and then you can have a little footer area and you can right click on those areas and you get all these options like we want to change this maybe i want to change that to a type of blue and then the bottom i'm going to change to a type of yellow let's make it yellow so there we go we've got a bit more color to it and in my form i can actually change things like i can say this is details about our employees now obviously that box is very small i'm going to just make it a bit bigger by dragging it making it a little bit bigger and then drag this up a bit just to make it a bit more aesthetically to make this a bit smaller boom and then move this up boom and then drag that up and there we go we've got a nice little form there are lots of other things you can add over the top there you can see you can add a logo or a title maybe you want to add the date and the time so if you add the date and the time you just click there and it will ask you what do you want you want the date and the time i just want the date so if i click just the date and you'll see it'll add that little thing over there if you want this in the footer you can just click on that and cut it and then come down to the bottom here and then just paste it and now i've got it at the bottom in my field and then you can obviously change if you go to home you can change the font and the color of all those different things there so there we go there are some nice things you can do in forms um other things that you can do in forms or just edit a random box there which i'm going to delete um other things that you can do in forms is you can change the positioning of these values so for example let's say i want first name and surname to be like one on top of each other now when i click on this do you see that if i move this this this com this combo this first name and cena you see it moves it together both the label and the text box it moves them together now i want the name first name label to be on top and i want the surname to be on top over here but i want the actual text boxes to be underneath them so do you see those two little boxes there those little gray blocks now if i click on the one over here do you notice when i move it it just moves the one and if i move it now together as a whole it'll move them together so if i don't click on those boxes it'll it'll move the whole the whole combo but if i click on those little gray box i can move them individually and so i can do things like that i can make this a little bit smaller and then i can move this one to where i want so i'm going to move this up a bit here and then i'll click on that gray box so that i can make the surname go underneath so it looks a little bit nicer so no don't move it i want to resize it there we go so there you go you can change the actual layout of it let's go view it so you can see it looks a little bit different so you can change those little layouts and things like that you can do over there other things that you can do is you can actually go and you can say hey you know when i'm going through this form let's go look view it when i'm going through the form and i want to see or i want to just highlight all those that got about that are paid more than a thousand in some sort of way so i'm going to come to design view and you can actually just right click on a particular form you've got all these options i want the conditional formatting now if you're familiar with excel this is exactly the same as excel so i want if this field let's put a new rule if the field's value is greater than equal to a thousand then what do i want it to look like well i want the i want the text to be in green and i want the full of it to be what's go what goes good with the grain let's give it orange nice orange background so it looks like that so if i do that now you'll see it doesn't actually do anything to the field now if i go view it you'll see it does nothing there's you can't see why isn't it working because that field isn't above a thousand yet if i click there oh that one's above thousands so you can see it's changed the format but the ones that aren't above a thousand aren't changed so that's a nice little way to just highlight what you want you can also change for example if you change these fields you can actually change the background of the whole form as we showed earlier with the background full color but you can also click on different aspects like this you can right click and change the full color of these particular components if you want them to be in yellow for example to make a little funky if you want to do it to a whole bunch of of these components so you want all the labels you can just click on one label and press con i think it's control and then you can click on multiple ones at the same time so i'm holding down control while i click here so that means they're all selected so therefore when i change their fill color it'll change all of them and you can do that obviously to the text boxes or the labels so there we go so that's how you can design your form you've got a lot of options if you're not too sure you can always just right click over here and see what options are available to you so there's lots of little things that you can insert here and and change and change the layout and so there you've got a nice looking form this one looks a bit terrible i need to change this a bit more colors and make it a little bit more aesthetically pleasing but you get the idea so you can now create forms go into the create form harry potter i mean was it or and then once you've got a form you can just obviously go to the forms design view and change the way that you like change things that you want to make it look a little bit better than maybe this is that's not too bad but we could make it a bit better for more videos in this video series please go to our youtube channel click on the subscribe button click on the like button we'd love to hear from you and remember don't do it the long way do it the mr long way