still don't see it. I asked if you populated the controlsource with a field name or a value, You said you don't populate the controlsource at all - so agreed it is unbound. I'm asking how does a user edit data? - they click the load button - what does the code behind the button actually do?
The load button code behind- is a select statement that populates the controls with values and makes the form editable
The insert button- code-behind only inserts values.
This approach has always been in ms access but rarely used by developers because it's time-consuming.
Hope that explains it better, but as some others have advised using bound control can work in this scenario, so it's left to the OP whether to use linked tables or query.