Removing buttons from the Quick Access toolbar

Want to remove a command from the Quick Access toolbar? It’s easy:

Point to the unwanted button on the Quick Access toolbar and right-click.

Choose Remove from Quick Access Toolbar from the pop-up menu (see Figure 2-15).

Voilà! It’s gone.

Because the button remains on the tab where it originally lived, it’s not lost — it’s just not taking up space at the top of the Access workspace.

Be careful not to remove the default buttons — Save, Undo, and Redo. Why? Because they’re used so often that it’s silly to remove them from such a great location. If you do remove them, you’ll have to use the Quick Access menu button and select them from that menu when you want to use them. That’s two steps (opening the menu and making a selection) instead of one, and who wants to increase steps by 100 percent? Not me!

Minimizing the Ribbon

Need more elbow room? If you need to spread out and want more workspace, you can make the Ribbon smaller, reducing it to just a strip of the tab titles (whichever tabs are in place at the time you choose to minimize the Ribbon). When it’s minimized, you can bring it back to full size with minimum fuss.

Figure 2-15: Reconsidering that added button? No problem. Say byebye with a simple right-click.

To minimize the Ribbon, follow these steps:

1. Right-click anywhere on the Ribbon.

A pop-up menu appears. Note that you can click on a button, a Ribbon tab, or a section name (such as “Reports” on the Create tab, or “Font” on the Home tab) and the appropriate pop-up menu will appear.

2. Choose Collapse the Ribbon.

The Ribbon is reduced to a long bar with just the tab titles on it, as shown in Figure 2-16.

3. To bring the Ribbon back to its full glory, right-click the reduced Ribbon and then choose Collapse the Ribbon.

Note that the command is now checked (as also shown in Figure 2-16), indicating that the Ribbon is currently minimized. Performing this step — reselecting the command — toggles this setting off, and the Ribbon returns to full size.

Figure 2-16: The Ribbon, minimized.

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Databases with user forms

When you’re planning your database, consider how the data will be entered: If you’ll be doing the data entry yourself, perhaps you’re comfortable working in a spreadsheet-like environment (known in Access as Datasheet view), where the table is a big grid. You fill it in row by row, and each row is a record. Figure 1-1 shows a table of customers in progress in Datasheet view. You decide: Is it easy to use, or can you picture yourself forgetting to move down a row and entering the wrong stuff in the wrong columns as you enter each record? As you can see, there are more fields than show in the window, so you’d be doing a lot of scrolling to the left and right to use this view. You may want to use a form (shown in Figure 1-2) instead. A form is a specialized interface for data entry, editing, and for viewing your database one record at a time, if Someone else will be handling data entry Typing row after row of data into a big grid seems mind-numbing Figure 1-1: Datasheet view ...

Adding buttons to the Quick Access toolbar

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A field, you remember, is where your data lives. Each field holds one piece of data, such as Last Name or Batting Average. Because there are so many different kinds of information in the world, Access offers a variety of field types for storing it. In fact, Access puts the following field types at your disposal: Short Text Long Text Number Currency Date & Time Yes/No Lookup & Relationship Rich Text Attachment Hyperlink OLE Object Calculated There’s also an Autonumber field type, which is applied automatically to the first field in a new, blank database. The types just listed are those available for fields you create in addition to that first field — the ones that will contain your data. For now, suffice it to say that the Autonumber field is a field that contains an automatically-generated number so that each record is unique in that it has a unique autonumber, or ID. You get the word about the need for (and ways to create) unique fields later on, in Chapter ...

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