The topic covered in Rick’s Tech Help video explains how to refresh displayed data tables when changes are made in one form and then you switch to another. What I’m discussing here is a method for ensuring that changes made in one form are automatically updated and reflected in every other open form currently displaying the same data—without needing to switch to those forms. Note: this is likely a Developer- or Advanced-level topic.

So how is this possible?

The answer lies in Access’s built-in event messaging system. When a form modifies data in a table, it can instruct all other open forms to refresh their displays—provided they’re using the same table data.

VBA enables this through the creation of a singleton global object of a class that supports user-defined events. Any other class instance—such as the code module of a form—can assign a local reference to this global object and receive any events it broadcasts.

The global singleton object also exposes public subroutines that accept user-defined parameters, which are then sent to all event listeners. When a form updates a table, it should call the global object’s subroutine to broadcast an update signal to all hooked listeners. The form that initiated the update should also handle the event itself to refresh its own display. This way, any form can trigger an event that notifies both itself and all other listeners to update their displays accordingly.

Example Project

A demonstration of this technique is provided in a simple Access project. It displays a form with a textbox and prompts the user to create additional similar forms. This example shows that it doesn’t matter how many listeners are hooked into the global object’s event messages—they will all receive the same events.
Once multiple forms are displayed, typing into the textbox of any form immediately updates the textbox content in all other forms. This confirms that all forms are both sending and receiving events.

You can download the example project from GitHub at the following location: https://github.com/NfaToys/Global-Messaging-Events-Class/tree/main