basically what you have done, after looking at your file, is produced an Oracle-type, form-driven-architectural database, but rather than displaying stacked forms you are using MS's new consolidation feature, the nav form. it doesn't look that bad, to be honest.
I'm not sure what stacked forms are to be honest but I'll look it up to see if it would be better suited. I'm still pretty new to access and jumped into it quite suddenly.
Some of the buttons on the left side pane open forms in their own windows, some open them in the nav form main window itself, some open in form view, some open in datasheet view.
Thank you for mentioning this, it is something I meant to ask about. It is inconsistent and mostly by design/need as it is. I think the All Lectures opening in a new tab is actually unnecessary now that I created the Student and Worker reports but originally the reason for the ones opening in their own windows is that we frequently need to send a support worker or student a list of the lectures to show the student or support worker details. I intended to do this by just using the column filter on student/support worker and then exporting that as Excel etc. I didn't get a chance to test it before it was in production and we noticed that the export didn't work, it just showed a couple field names. The Report tabs work correctly now for the purpose but I'm not sure what the problem is with exporting the currently viewed tab within in the nav form?
the other thing is that, the ones that open in datasheet view, you have combo boxes in the fields. all the experts say not to do that. I'm guessing because of this:
http://access.mvps.org/access/lookupfields.htm.
This is an area I am confused about. I was told in another thread here that choosing lookup as a field type in design view is bad but using a lookup in the properties is ok? Or is it the same thing? I'm not in front of access now so I hope you know what I mean.
Okay, so, if I understand what you wanted correctly, what you need to do is use a single form that shows all the records from your table or query. You can then use this form for all your buttons. The only difference is you would use a specific Navigation Where Clause for each button to apply to that same form, so it will display different sets of records based on whichever button was clicked. Hope that helps...
Well I think what I am asking is if that's the best way. I've just discovered that that's possible and it certainly seems like a simpler and cleaner approach. But would it work well from a user perspective? Should I go for a horizontal tab for each support type, with vertical tabs for allocated/unallocated, student/support worker filtered/queried forms for each?
You could use a main/subform arangement and just change the subform as required
also I hate the tabbed option in the document window option I always use Overlapping but thats me
I didn't really think about subforms to be honest. It's important that I can get that drilled down information exported and I don't really want the user to find the information they need and then have to open another window/form and drill down again to export it. Or am I missing something? Please see my response above about the lookup issue, I would be grateful for any clarity on this issue.
Many thanks for all of your replies, I really appreciate the thoughts. I'm very new to this and probably doing lots of things wrong so it's extremely useful to hear.