Text in field is too long to see

[grunder]

Hi, Newbie here -
I inherited a database. There are 8,100 records. There are 12 columns. One is 'Comments". It's a 'memo' column.

When this column is on the screen, it's too long for the screen (I have a wide monitor). Most of the entries in this column are short. Some of the entries in this column are longer than the screen.

On some of the long entries, the 'home' and the 'end' keys will move to the beginning and to the end of the field so you can read the entire line; the column actually shifts right and left.

But on other similar long entries, the 'end' key does not move the column, and you can't see the text at the end of the entry. (whew)

What do I need to do to be able to use the 'home' and 'end' keys to see all of the long text in this column?

Thanks,

John

 

[Jeanette Cunningham]

In design view, make the textbox just wide enough to fit on your screen. Put a vertical scroll bar on the textbox and make the textbox higher that just one line in height.
Make the entire form narrower so that you can see the complete width of the form on your monitor.

 

[Pat Hartman]

While the scroll bars are fine if there are only a few lines of text, most people get disoriented reading large amounts. In that case, they can use the zoombox. The zoombox option is automatically available for all form fields. In any form field hit shift-F2 to open a box with the entire field contents. Th nice part of this solution is that it is completely free of work. You are just making use of the built in Access function.

I showed this feature to a recent client and he liked it very much but he wanted it to work in the double-click event instead of shift-F2. My response was. The function is free as it is or you can pay me to duplicate the functionality for every form field where it might be needed. Your choice. Guess what his choice was?

 

[front.desk]

I am just wondering if there is a way to set a form's fields to automatically grow and shrink as needed for the information to be visible all at once, without using the shift F2 feature?

 

[Jeanette Cunningham]

Reports will do this automatically when you set the can grow and can shrink properties of a textbox to yes.

There is no easy way to do this with forms.
You could try writing some code to count how many characters in each textbox and then change the height accordingly - it is tricky because most fonts allow a different width for each character. Courier is a fixed width font that would make this task easier.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

the other thing about the shift-F2 that Pat mentioned, is that you can edit the data without a problem. (or not - it respects the settings of the text box). If you use code to open a form with the data on, you may get into the "another user changed your record" position, although you could use a button click to do accmdzoombox (i think it is)

ultimately, it is up to you. screen real estate is valuable stuff though, and it's often hard to get everything on screen.