It's a cool effect that can be mimicked in Access, but would definitely be great if you had greater control over where the popup occurs.

A couple things I've done are create in image to place on a form that looks like a form field with the calendar icon positioned where you want it then place a borderless text control over it and use the click event of the image to open the date picker. Alternatively, (hold the rotten tomatoes), use a stacked layout so that in one cell is your text box control and then beside it a button with the calendar icon that launches the date picker. No border between the two cells and no padding between them then set the gridlines to surround both cells without showing between them so it looks like one field.

Hi Michael

In Richards How to Open the Date Picker Automatically When You Click on a Field or Tab to it in Microsoft Access

You could change the on got focus to:

Private Sub MyDatePicker_GotFocus()

    MyDatePicker.ShowDatePicker = 1
    DoCmd.RunCommand acCmdShowDatePicker
    MyDatePicker.ShowDatePicker = 0

End Sub

You need to change the show date picker to Never in the properties
You could also make a button.

Yeah, I've seen that style date picker on websites too, where the calendar icon appears inside the text box itself. This has come up in the MVP forums and in discussions with the Access Team. As far as I know, they haven't announced any plans to add that kind of built-in control to Access.

Darrin's suggestion using my Date Picker technique is probably the easiest current solution. Donald's visual workaround can work too, especially if you just want the appearance of a single combined field.

This would also be a great use for a class module. You could create a reusable class that attaches to a date field and displays a small calendar button or pop-up wherever you want relative to that control. That would make a nice advanced developer lesson.

I would like a right click "menu" function in the form that could be used in any date field. And it has the ability to enter the year or month without clicking on a bunch of up and down arrows! Are there any other types of standard entry fields that could also use a right click for "picking" data that isn't combo box oriented?

Thomas I built a database for myself a while back with a combo box in the upper-right corner of the form containing common date choices: today's date, first day of the month, last day of the quarter, and so on. In its AfterUpdate event, it would look at Screen.PreviousControl. If you had clicked into a date field and then selected an item from that combo box, it would fill in whichever date field you had been in previously. That worked quite well.

For a date range, you could do something similar with a small pop-up form. For example, if you have Start1/End1 and Start2/End2, you could store the corresponding end control name in the Tag property of each start control. Then the pop-up knows which two fields it is working with and can fill both dates.

There are lots of ways to build this, but unfortunately Access does not make custom right-click pop-up menus particularly easy. It can be done - I've covered customizing the right-click shortcut menu in Developer classes - but it is more work than it ought to be.