Tab to Form Footer
By Richard Rost
2 years ago
Keyboard Navigation to Form Footer in MS Access Forms In this Microsoft Access tutorial, we'll learn how to navigate between sections of a form using only the keyboard, addressing a student question on jumping from the last field in the detail section directly to the form footer. Discover both a beginner keyboard shortcut method and a simple one-line VBA code solution. Ryan from Columbia, Maryland (a Silver Member) asks: I have several fields in my form footer that I want to navigate to using the tab key, without needing to use the mouse. Is there a way to jump from the last field in the detail section directly to the first field in the form footer? MembersIn the extended cut, I will show you how to use the shift tab to navigate back to the previous section and discuss implementing this feature in continuous forms. This advanced navigation technique will ensure a seamless keyboard-only user experience within Microsoft Access forms. Silver Members and up get access to view Extended Cut videos, when available. Gold Members can download the files from class plus get access to the Code Vault. If you're not a member, Join Today!
PrerequisitesLinksRecommended Courses
Keywords TechHelp Access, form footer navigation, keyboard navigation, Microsoft Access forms, VBA keyboard shortcut, tab order, cycle properties, tab cycle, F6 shortcut, Shift+F6 shortcut, VBA setfocus, key down event, tab key programming, Access VBA tutorials, section navigation, control page up down
Intro In this video, we will talk about how to navigate between different sections of a form in Microsoft Access using only the keyboard. I will show you the basic method for beginners to move between the detail section and the form footer using the F6 key, how to adjust form properties like tab cycle, and keyboard shortcuts to move through records. For those comfortable with a bit of VBA, I will demonstrate how to use a simple line of code to jump directly between fields in different sections, making keyboard navigation smoother and data entry more efficient.Transcript Welcome to another TechHelp video brought to you by AccessLearningZone.com. I'm your instructor Richard Rost. Today we're gonna learn how to tab between the different sections of a form with just a keyboard. Right, you got a single form here. You got some fields up top. You go tap tap tap tap tap tap. You got stuff down here in the form footer or maybe in the form header up top, right? You come down here, you hit tab. What does it do? It jumps you to the top of the next record. No, I want to be able to go down to the form footer or maybe back up. That's what we're gonna talk about in today's video. This is going to be both a beginner and a developer video because there's a way to do it with just a keyboard, which I'm gonna show you for the beginners. And then if you're a little more advanced with your developers, you don't have to remember any special keystrokes. I'll teach you how to just jump right from this one down to here with a little tiny bit of code - one line of code folks, just one line.
Today's question comes from Ryan in Columbia, Maryland one of my silver members. Ryan says, "I've got several fields in my form footer that I want to navigate to using the tab key without needing to use the mouse. I'm the same way. I hate when I'm doing data entry and having to stop and grab the mouse. Is there a way to jump from the last field in the detail section directly to the first field in the form footer?" Yes, let me show you the beginner way first where you can just hit a particular key. It's not the tab key unfortunately, but it'll do what you need to do without any programming.
Before we get started, if you are a beginner and you're not familiar with the tab order, tab stops, and tab cycle, go watch this video course. Watch my Access Beginner 1 class first. I do talk about tab order in that, but this covers a few other things you might find of interest. Here it is on my website and on my YouTube channel. Go watch this and come on back.
Okay, here I am in my TechHelp free template. This is a free database you can download on my website if you want to. In here I got a form, customer form, and let's say I got some stuff down in the form footer. Now it could be just other fields, could be random stuff down here. So let's turn the form footer on: right click and then form header/footer. We don't use the page header/footer - the page header/footer is for printing forms and we don't print forms, we print reports, so we will never use the page header, all right? Form header/footer.
Now you can use the form header if you want to put stuff over here in the form header too. That's fine. I sometimes put the ID up there because I don't want the user to have access to it anyways because they can't change it. Right, so let's say we're gonna put the notes down here. That's fine and maybe these three fields, all right? It's really stylistically up to you if you want to have stuff in the form footer. Usually I use a form footer a lot for calculations, but you could have fields like a notes field down here. In continuous forms, which we'll talk about in a minute, you can put your notes field down here and it'll be bound to whatever field you happen to be on, okay? I'm just gonna get rid of these buttons for the sake of argument here. Let's go to this, it's active, and okay. So we got our fields in here, save it, close it. If I open it back up again, I start there in first name and I hit tab tab tab tab tab tab tab tab. All right, and it jumps to the first field in the next record. I went to record two.
All right, first thing I want to do though is if you're gonna do this, if you like jumping between the sections, I like having it so it just cycles on the current record. That's my preference. That's what I like to do. So I'm gonna go up here to the form properties, so the square right there, go to other, and I like to change the cycle to the current record only. That's just something I like to do. This way, no matter how many times you tab, it just stays on the same record. If you want to go to a different record, you can just come down here and hit the next record button like that.
Now if you are a keyboard warrior and you want to move between the records, Control+Page Up and Page Down. So Control+Page Down will move you through the records that way or Page Up. Okay, if this is the stuff you do every day, you just, you just remember it, right? Control+Page Up, Page Down. Okay, now I said there's a keyboard shortcut to move between the different sections. Yes, it's the F6 key. Again, you just got to remember it. Write it down, put it on a sticky note, and eventually it'll stick. If you hit F6, it'll jump you down to the next section. Now here's the problem: hit F6 again and it jumps you over the navigation pane. Now you're over here, right? Hit F6 again, and now you're down here. So F6 is a bit of a pain. Now it's up on the ribbon, now it's back in here, now it's there, right? Shift+F6 will go backwards. So if you want to take the time to remember that, maybe even put it on a label right here, right? F6 to go to the form footer, that's up to you. Okay, so that's the non-programming keyboard method: F6, Shift+F6, and of course Control+Page Up/Page Down if you want to move through the records.
All right, what about the way to make it easy? So when you're up here, and you hit tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, now, I want to go tab down into the notes section. Right, how do we do that? Well, we need one line of code, one line of VBA code. Well, we got it, and it's just where to put it, right? Now first, if you've never done any VBA programming before, don't panic. It's not hard. Just go watch this video first. It's about 20 minutes long. It'll teach you everything you need to know to get started. So go watch this.
All right, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go into Design View. We're gonna find the field that we want to be on. So when the user hits tab, we're gonna grab that tab key, right, the key press on the keyboard, and we're gonna say okay, if I see a tab key while you're sitting here, I want you to jump there. Okay, so open up the properties for country or whatever the last field is in your detail section. Pop over to events, and you want to find key down. Now there's key press and there's key down. For this, we're gonna use key down. They're slightly different in the way that they work. There's key down, key up, and key press. I actually have another video coming out soon on the differences between the three of those, but for now, let's just focus on key down. Hit the dot dot dot button, that'll open up your VBA code editor.
So we're gonna resize it. Yeah, there we go. We don't need the Project Explorer, so I'm gonna close that. All right, nice and simple. I'm in country key down. Now the key down event gets two things: the key code, which is what key was pressed, and then the shift key, which indicates whether the Control, Shift, or Alt keys were pressed. We don't need that for this example right now. Okay, so what I'm gonna say in here is if the key code equals, it's a special key, called vbKeyTab. That's a special constant, right? Then, so in other words, if I see the tab key come in while I'm on the country field, where do I want to go? I'm gonna go out to the notes field. So I'm gonna say notes.setfocus. That says move over to the notes field. That's it. That's all you need. That's one line of code. Right? Key code equals vbKeyTab, and notice how that camel case, right? It capitalized those because Access recognizes that as a constant. Then notes.setfocus. All right, debug, compile once in a while, save it, close it, close it, open it, and here we go.
Tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, and I'm right down there. See that? Pretty cool, pretty cool. Now let's keep going. Tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab. Now it's just cycling in the footer. Okay, so we can do the same thing with the credit limit field. When it hits credit limit, if I hit tab here, jump back up here to first name. We're never going up to the customer ID because it's just, you can't change it anyways. It's just for, it's just to sit there and look pretty, right? So right now, come in here. I'm going to, I want you to pause the video right now, and I want you to do it on your own, right? Credit limit, and then what do we do from here? Did you get it? Did you get it to work? All right. Go to events, key down, dot dot dot. Same thing: if key code equals vbKeyTab then first name.setfocus. Save it. I like throwing a debug, compile once in a while, close it, close it, open it. Tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, and I'm back up. That's it. See? One line of code. A lot of stuff in Access really is just one line of code will do what you need to do. Really super cool. You just got to know where to put that line of code.
All right, so what if you want to go backwards? What if you go tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, you're down here, you want to go back up the country with a little shift tab. Oh, that doesn't quite work, does it? Well, let's see. Tab, tab, tab, tab, shift tab now, now it went back to the one before that in the tab order, which was over here. So that's gonna need some additional coding. Also, what about continuous forms? All right, in here, you want to go tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, and have it come down here in the footer if you have a blank record, right? Well, how do you do both of those things? We'll talk about that in the extended cut for the members. I'll show you how to use shift tab to go back up to here, and we'll talk about doing it in a continuous form.
Silver members and up get access to all of my extended cut videos, all of them. There's like hundreds of them now, and gold members can download these databases, and everybody gets free classes, and becoming a member is just, it's what the cool kids are doing, so slap that join button, and if you have any questions, let me know. But that is gonna be your TechHelp video for today. Hope you learned something. Live long and prosper, my friends. See you next time!
TOPICS:
Tabbing between form sections using keyboard
Basic method to move between form sections
Using F6 and Shift+F6 for navigation
Setting form properties for tab cycling
Control+Page Up/Down for record navigation
Implementing a keyboard shortcut with code
Using VBA to jump to a form footer
VBA KeyDown event and key code handling
Using vbKeyTab to identify the Tab key
Setting focus on specific form fields with VBA
Handling the tab order in continuous forms
Using VBA to jump back to the detail section
COMMERCIAL:
In today's video, we are going to learn how to efficiently navigate between different sections of a form in Microsoft Access using just the keyboard. First, we'll cover the basic, mouse-free method for beginners. You'll learn how to use key shortcuts, like F6, to move between form sections without programming. Then, for those of you looking for a more advanced solution, we'll explore an easy way to automate this with a single line of VBA code, making data entry faster and more efficient. Plus, we'll discuss setting form properties to cycle through the current record and keyboard shortcuts for navigating multiple records. So whether you're an Access newbie or a seasoned pro, there's something here for everyone. You'll find the complete video on my YouTube channel and on my website at the link shown. Live long and prosper my friends.Quiz Q1. What feature does Richard teach you to navigate between the sections of a form using the keyboard?
A. Using the mouse to click on different sections
B. Using the F6 key to jump between sections
C. Using the Page Up and Page Down keys only
D. Using the arrow keys to scroll through sections
Q2. What keyboard shortcut is initially taught to move through records individually in the form?
A. Shift + F5
B. Control + Page Up and Page Down
C. Control + Tab
D. Alt + Tab
Q3. When adjusting form properties, which setting does Richard recommend changing to keep the cycle on the current record?
A. Go to the first record
B. Go to the last field
C. Cycle to the current record only
D. Cycle to all records
Q4. What keyboard method does Richard describe as a bit of a pain due to cycling between multiple areas like the ribbon and navigation pane?
A. Page Up/Page Down
B. Shift + F6
C. F6 key
D. Esc key
Q5. What line of code does Richard introduce to make the form automatically jump to a specific field upon hitting the Tab key in a particular section?
A. notes.setFocus
B. notes.jumpTo
C. notes.activateField
D. notes.openFocus
Q6. Which event does Richard use to capture keystrokes for the Tab navigation function?
A. Mouse Click
B. Key Release
C. Key Down
D. Key Press
Q7. According to Richard, what needs to be used alongside vbKeyTab to focus on a particular field?
A. .execCommand
B. .setFocus
C. .selectField
D. .highlightField
Q8. What does Richard suggest will be covered in the extended cut of the video?
A. Using direct mouse inputs
B. Continuous forms and using Shift+Tab in reverse order
C. Advanced form printing techniques
D. Additional layout design tips
Answers: 1-B; 2-B; 3-C; 4-C; 5-A; 6-C; 7-B; 8-B
DISCLAIMER: Quiz questions are AI generated. If you find any that are wrong, don't make sense, or aren't related to the video topic at hand, then please post a comment and let me know. Thanks.Summary Today's TechHelp tutorial from Access Learning Zone explores how to navigate between different sections of a form using only a keyboard. I'll show you an easy method for beginners and a simple coding solution for those with a bit more VBA knowledge.
Imagine you have a single form with fields at the top and some at the bottom, possibly in the form footer or header. When you use the Tab key, it usually takes you to the first field of the next record, which isn't always what we want. Today, we'll address how to navigate directly to the form footer or back without switching records. The techniques discussed today aim to enhance data entry efficiency, especially if you prefer not to use a mouse.
First, if you're new to using the Tab order, stops, and cycle in Access, I recommend reviewing my Access Beginner 1 class for an overview. This tutorial builds on that foundational knowledge.
In the form I'm using for this example, which comes from my TechHelp free template available on my website, you might find you have fields or other components in the form footer. To display these, simply enable the form footer via design view. For layout and customization, it's open to preference—you might, for instance, position fields here for calculations or additional notes.
A critical step as you set this up is adjusting the form properties so the cycle option is set to the current record only. This ensures the Tab key maintains focus within the same record, rather than jumping to the next one. To move between records, use the Control key with Page Up or Page Down.
For moving between sections, the F6 key can switch you from one section of the form to another. Keep in mind that F6 can cycle through other areas like the navigation pane and the ribbon, which can be less convenient. Shift+F6 reverses the direction.
For a more seamless experience, especially when moving into a form footer, we can use a simple line of VBA code. If you're unfamiliar with VBA, I have a helpful video tutorial to get you started. You locate the field you want to trigger this functionality and use the Key Down event property to capture the Tab key, redirecting focus to the desired field using a command like notes.setfocus.
For ease of navigation, you simply insert this line of code in the appropriate Key Down event. Debugging and compiling are routine steps to ensure everything runs smoothly. Once in place, tabbing from the last field in the detail section will take you directly to the form footer.
If you're curious about advanced techniques like using Shift+Tab to reverse navigation or how to apply these principles to continuous forms, these topics are covered in more depth in the extended cut available to Silver members and above. Gold members can also download databases, and all members have access to free classes. Membership comes with significant perks.
For a comprehensive step-by-step guide, including a video demonstration, visit my website. Live long and prosper, my friends.Topic List Tabbing between form sections using keyboard
Basic method to move between form sections
Using F6 and Shift+F6 for navigation
Setting form properties for tab cycling
Control+Page Up/Down for record navigation
Implementing a keyboard shortcut with code
Using VBA to jump to a form footer
VBA KeyDown event and key code handling
Using vbKeyTab to identify the Tab key
Setting focus on specific form fields with VBA
Handling the tab order in continuous forms
Using VBA to jump back to the detail section |
