Building modern looking data forms & reports in Access 2003 can be difficult. Doing the heavy lifting is easy - there are great tools for building the data-bound portions of the form - but making the interface look great can be a challenge and can require some creative hacks. UtterAccess even has a popular board devoted to helping people build better looking interfaces. In Access 12, we've built a number of features that will help people build great looking apps with far less code, time and effort...

Last week we looked at the WYSIWYG report authoring tools , this week we'll take a look at the similar forms designer. Since forms generally don't repeat like reports do this designer looks more like the old form authoring tools than the report designer did, but it is still noticeably quicker and easier to use. WYSIWYG Form Authoring Like the report designer, the core of the new forms authoring tools is the ability to see live data at design time. This makes it easier to tell what the user's experience...

The Office 2007 preview site is now up, with a number of materials on Access available and the ability to sign up for the Office beta program. To sign up for the beta, follow this link and then click on the "Register Now" button at the top. I'm back from Access Advisor and I'll have a post on the new Forms Designer for you tomorrow.

Access 12 has a variety of tools designed to make it both quicker and easier to author applications. The WYSIWYG report authoring view tools fit both bills. We saw a bit of them in the posts on Customizing the Issues Template and Starting from Scratch and can finally dive in deeper into the features this time. A knowledgeable Access developer will not be able to create reports that are significantly different than he could in Access 2003, but he'll be able to build those reports more quickly and...