Kiosk Forms
One of my favorite tricks with forms in Access has always been what I call a kiosk form. A kiosk form is a form that takes up the entire screen and is one that you might find in a store or shopping center displaying information. For example, a real estate kiosk might display homes for sale in the area. These screens often take up the entire screen so your attention is drawn to the content on the screen. Interesting scenarios for a kiosk form include:
- Real estate information
- Dashboards
- Store directory
- Product searches
You can create a kiosk form in Access by maximizing a popup form. When you do this, the form will cover the entire desktop including the Access window and give it this kiosk effect. This is really easy to do by using the Maximize macro action in the Open event, or with the following line of code:
DoCmd.Maximize
If the form appears to flicker when being maximized, you might consider suspending screen updates using the Echo method as follows:
With DoCmd
.Echo False
.Maximize
.Echo True
End With
Be sure to set the Popup property of the form to Yes to see this in action. The BorderStyle property of the form also has an impact on the form:
- When the BorderStyle property is set to None or Dialog, the form will also cover the Windows Taskbar
- When the BorderStyle property is set to Single or Thin, the form will not cover the Windows Taskbar
