Welcome back to our course on Access 2016.
In this section we’re going to take a look at Access Options.
And these are a major aspect of the customization of both your installation of Access 2016 and
how you use it.
If you’ve used a recent version of Access before you can probably skip this section.
And in fact in this section I’m really just going to introduce you to Access Options and
cover some of the most important options to set correctly at this early stage and then
we’ll be returning to Access Options throughout the course as we need to look at new options
in the light of new material that we cover.
So to open Access Options we normally go into Backstage View and down and click on Options.
You’ve seen this dialog before.
And the options are arranged in pages and I’m going to start up at the first page,
General.
Now the first few settings there are not the most important settings in Access Options
but I want to demonstrate the general principle so let’s look at one or two of those.
Let’s begin with that top one, Enable Live Preview.
Now it’s currently checked.
Let’s just cancel the options.
And let me go into Form Design.
And in Form Design I’m going to click on Themes and we’re going to look at some of
the themes that we might apply to this form.
Watch what happens as I hover over these themes.
Note how the color of the form changes and the font changes, the font size changes, etcetera.
That’s because what’s happening is live preview.
Now let’s go back into Access Options, let’s switch off Live Preview.
Having made a change in Options I click on OK to enable and confirm that change.
Let’s go through Themes again.
Now let me hover over those themes again and there is no change happening.
You’re not getting the live preview.
Now you may say, “Well, why would I not want live preview?”
For some people some aspects of how Access works can be distracting and in many cases
can be completely unnecessary and can actually slow the system down in some situations.
And particularly once you’ve been using Access 2016 for a while you may find that
some aspects of what Access 2016 can do to help you you no longer need.
Let’s look at another example.
If I hover over the commands up here on the Ribbon each of them gives me a what’s called
a Screen Tip.
And that screen tip is the name of what this particular button is or does.
So that one’s Image, that one’s Bound Object Frame, that one’s Subform Report.
In some cases if I hover over a button not only do I get a name, in this case Logo, but
I get a description of what it does.
And if I go back into Access Options again, by the way I’m just going to enable Live
Preview again, I can control those screen tips using this dropdown here.
And there are three available options.
Show feature descriptions, that’s the long description, Don’t show feature descriptions,
Don’t show screen tips at all.
If I set Don’t show screen tips, click on OK, now if I hover over those buttons that
one says nothing, that one says nothing.
Now again some people find those screen tips distracting and although I generally have
them switched on when I’m recording a training course because it helps people to see what
each of these buttons does it’s actually quite awkward because quite often those screen
tips go over something that I’m trying to show you.
And when you’re working with Access 2016 yourself you may find that they sometimes
obscure things and you may want to switch them off.
But for the moment I’m going to go back in and switch those screen tips fully back
on.
So we’re going to have screen tips including feature descriptions.
Another important section on this General page is the section Creating Databases because
here you select the default file format for blank databases.
Generally speaking when you’re creating databases in Access 2016 you will want to
be creating them in Access 2016 format, which means that you’ll be using the setting here
which covers all of the versions of Access from 2007 to 2016.
The format for Access databases has been consistent over that range of versions.
But if you’re working in a situation where your databases need to be compatible with
earlier versions of Access, so for example you were working in a team and other members
of the team were using say Access 2003 and you all needed to have compatible databases
you would have to set your default to that earlier version, Access 2002-2003 or even
earlier to Access 2000.
Now this is only your default.
In any particular situation you can always save an Access database in one of those earlier
formats but if you’re working on an Access database in Access 2016 and you need to save
it in say Access 2000 format certain features that have been introduced since 2000 may not
be supported in that format so you may not be able to save those features in the earlier
version.
So you need to be wary of that.
But for most people using Access nowadays the default of 2007-2016 is the best choice
because it covers the last four versions of Access.
Now you noticed earlier on in the course that by default new databases were created in a
certain folder.
That’s my default database folder.
Mine is set to that.
I could set it to something else.
You could, for example, set yours to the course files folder or the exercise files folder.
Entirely up to you.
But I do suggest that you set it to a folder that is suitable for use with this course
and then maybe when you finish the course you can archive the contents of that folder
away, for example.
One of the features of databases that we haven’t covered yet but we will come to later on is
sorting of databases.
And by default a database, a new database is assigned a sort order that determines how,
for example, text is sorted.
Things like names.
Now the default setting I have here is called General Legacy.
And the default needs to be set according to your language.
I’m going to talk about language in a moment.
My default language is set to English, although it’s slightly more complicated than that
as you’ll see.
And my default is set to General Legacy, which is a good default to have.
If you are using a different language you may need to choose a different database sort
order.
As you can see there are many to choose from.
And these include not only the Eastern language sort orders, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and
so on, but also some European ones such as Polish and French and Bosnian.
So you do need to make sure that your database sort order is set correctly here and that
will depend on your language.
The last couple of items I want to look at on this General page are Username and Initials.
These are used in some situations to identify you or the fact that you have done something.
Make sure that you’ve got your name and initials set there as well.
And then right at the very bottom, although we’ve seen this before, Office Background,
Office Theme.
Now that bottom section, the personalization section, relates to Microsoft Office and not
just Access 2016.
So this will be set across the components of Microsoft Office that you have and use.
Now having covered quite a few of the items on the General page there are only another
couple that I want to look at at this stage.
Let’s go to the Current Database page and this is really the main page for the settings
for the current database.
And one of the things right at the top here, Application Title.
This determines what is shown at the top of the workspace.
Contact Management Database it says at the moment.
Now there are many other settings for the current database that you can set here.
And just to give you an example of one of those.
If I go down to the Navigation section I can actually switch off the display of the Navigation
Pane.
When you come to actually let people start using the database that you’ve designed
and created you may want to switch off the Navigation Pane.
Why would you want to do that?
Well for security reasons.
It may be that you don’t want users to be able to go into the design of forms.
You may only want to be able to do certain things that are strictly controlled by you.
So for example, to add data or to change or delete data they have to do it via mechanisms
that you provide.
They can’t just go in and use the Navigation Pane in the way that you or I can.
Now that’s an example of the sort of thing that you can set on the current database which
enables you to give more control to what’s happening but also more security to the database.
And obviously we’ll be looking at a lot of those kinds of settings as move our way
through the course.
The second page that I want you to take a look at is the Language page because you need
to make sure that your language or languages are set correctly here.
Now when I’m using Office I really use two languages.
I use English (United States) and English (United Kingdom).
And they are quite different languages.
And my default language is English (United States).
Now you can see in that box at the top there, there’s my two languages, English (United
States), that’s my default, English (United Kingdom).
I could add additional languages and there are a lot of languages.
So make sure that your language or languages are set correctly there.
If you need to add a language select it from that list, click on Add.
If you need to remove a language select it in the box there, click on Remove.
And whichever one is your default set to Default.
Now we’ve already looked at the customized Ribbon and Quick Access Toolbar pages.
The Add-Ins page we won’t really be looking at on this course.
And the Trust Center page, this is to do with security, we will be looking at but much later
on.
Two or three other pages there that have got various items that we’re going to be referring
back to during the course.
But for now that is it on Access Options and you’ll probably be relieved to know that
having covered all of this material about working with Access we’re now going to start
making some databases.
We’re going to start that in the next section.
I’ll see you then.