Access shortcuts

Hi Filsan,

There are lots of shortcuts and 'made easy' functionalities that can be used in access. The number of them can be regarded as limitless. What you need to use depends on where you are using them.

If you are working directly with an access table and wish to copy an entry within the same field from one record line to the next, use holding down CTRL key with key press of appostrophe ' to copy. This also works in other places showing more than one record such as query results, and forms (when the form is as per default set up not with records locked or Edit unenabled). It will also work with forms in single view (but of course then you may not see the previous entry unless you have shown it in a subform or specialsed field cell).

Have you looked in the full access tips given in the foot area of these forum pages? There is a Tip given, but look lower down for the click on link to Show All Tips.

One that may not be in that lot is adding the ampersand character & to the front of labels that are associated with any 'field window' or button on a form (ie any form control). What this does is underline the first letter of the field name (as it appears on the form) and allows you to go straight to that field using the Alt key and the undelined letter. So say you are entering details of products in and you decide on price some time later, when you go back to the form you can Alt+P to go straight in and enter the price.

If you have a form for data entry and some fields are rarely used or data entered at a different time or by different user to a given set of fields, you can disable the tab stop in the properties for the fields concerned. In any case making sure your tab order on a form is correct can make life easier.

Good use of combo box drop downs including, where appropriate, putting criteria behind the supply to these is a fundamenetal but extremely good way of improving database usability and efficiency.

If you ever have to enter time of booking (or whatever it is that created a record needing a record creation time) then don't enter the time, just put =Now() in the Default property of your Time/Date field and in the format property for the field put a time format. The the time is automaitically put in when you create the recored. Or put in a date format if you want the date, or you can show date and time. If you wonly wnat date you can also use =Date()

There are probably thouands of examples like this. Macros, modules and VBA code really go further in helping the machines work for us. Reasons to love Access!