Best Practice for Form Design

[diofree]

Hi all,
I want to keep my users out of the Access tables as much as possible, and instead keep their interactions with the forms.

That being said, I'd like someone with more experience to give me some guidance on best practices when it comes to form design. What is the suggested approach when you have a form to modify information for a large number of entries? Say for instance I have information on 100 employees in my table. Going through the records one by one using the arrows in the navigation is not practical. The search bar could be useful, but that might not be best either. A drop-down on the form itself works well but not for a very long list of items in my experience. What do people recommend?

thanks!

 

[CJ_London]

it depends on the requirement - your analysis of the demands on the db should identify this. As you say, sometimes a user is updating one record at a time, another time they need to update 100's of records with the same value, and another time they need to view multiple records for a visual inspection and occasional change, etc. So I can't recommend any particular best practice, choose what is appropriate to the requirements of the users. It might be several forms for different views, might be one form the user can configure themselves (i.e. giving the user choices how they want to view/interact with the data).

 

[jdraw]

I agree with CJ --- analyze your requirement - you may need more than 1 solution.
Here is an article by Allen Browne which may apply when you have to find specific records out of many.

General thoughts on form design:

- don't get carried away with colors and/or fonts
- keep to the purpose of the form/box
- avoid confusion or too many choices on a single form