Updated AutoFormats and New UI
Access 2007 has significantly updated the AutoFormats included in the box, and we'll provide a tool that can help create your own formats or customize the existing ones. This provides a fast way to generate a good (and modern) looking set of formatting across all your applications. Access, along with the other Office applications, has supported AutoFormat for some time, but the formats themselves are looking a little stale. Access 2007 addresses that. In this post, I'll cover the built-in AutoFormats and how to customize them with the UI. In the next post I'll describe the tool and how to use it to built your own formats and customize the gallery below.
AutoFormat Tools
The ribbon makes it much easier to surface controls for things like AutoFormats. Where before we'd have to throw a dialog to show the formats, in Access 2007 we can simply show a "gallery":
The gallery control in the ribbon shows 4 formats in a row at 1280*1024, and provides controls for scrolling through the other rows of formats. In addition, there's a "More" button that expands the gallery into an in-place pop-up that shows all the formats present and is both scrollable and resize-able to accommodate custom formats.:
The Built-in Formats
The default format is the "Office 2007" format and is the one you get if you use the Quick Create tools to build a new form. In the examples, I'm showing a simple quick-created form. Note that the form is in Layout View, so the dotted line and yellow highlighting around the ID field below won't appear at runtime. The example below is the default quick-created form. Below that is each of the other built-in AutoFormats in name order. A couple of the formats have interesting stuff that is right-aligned, so I've linked an expanded version as well. Finally,
Default:
Access 2003:
Apex:
Aspect:
Civic:
Concourse:
Currency:
Deluxe:
Equity:
Flow:
Foundry:
Median:
Metro:
None:
Northwind:
Office:
Opulent:
Oriel:
(Click image to enlarge)
Origin:
Solstice:
(Click image to enlarge)
Technic:
Trek:
Urban:
Verve:
(Click image to enlarge)
Windows Vista:
Customizing AutoFormats Through UI
Access 12 provide a similar AutoFormat wizard to that in 2003 that lets users customize the look of the formats or push changes back to them. The wizard is launched from the bottom of the gallery and provide both a list of the formats with preview, and some customization controls.
Clicking the Options button expands the dialog to allow control over which parts of the form or report get formatted:
Clicking Customize presents another dialog that allows the user to save changes back up to the format:
You can choose to either save the changes to a new AutoFormat or update the existing one (if it isn't one of the built-in formats). If you create a new format, it will be available from the AutoFormat wizard dialog, but not from the collection on the ribbon. However, we have created a tool that will let you update the contents of the gallery to present your own formats. I'll cover that tool and how to build your own formats in the next post.
