Help article: Make controls stretch, shrink, or move as you resize a form

Control anchoring is a great addition to Access 2007. It is especially useful for memo-type notes fields. I was all set to create such a tool as a compliment to our ShrinkerStretcher product, but the Access team beat me to it.

Your instructive article is too slow and therefore it makes one switch off the attempt to do what you instruct to do.

I was keen to be able to do what your article suggests, but the waiting time put me off trying to do the interesting suggestions you givel. Viviana Vivienne Croccolo-Huwald

vivih@bigpond.com

Home phone +610396785999

Hi, There were several interesting discussions about this promising feature in this blog. Search for Anchoring to find them. Here are a few comments: 1) There is no option to have the fonts automatically resized as the form gets stretched. This can be very useful if the user wants to just enlarge everything to fit a particular screen resolution. 2) Access does not automatically "remember" the last size that the form was stretched to. So every time the user opens the form she must again stretch it. This can be a nuisance. I understand this can be solved with some programming that includes API commands, and saving the last size in a table. 3) There is a paragraph in the article that this blog refers to that I do not understand: “On multiple-item forms (those in which the Default View property is set to Continuous Forms), Access uses tabular control layouts by default. In a tabular layout, the anchoring feature only moves and stretches controls vertically. For example, the Stretch Down and Across anchoring option only causes a control to stretch across, not down.” This seems illogical to me. If the form only stretches vertically, doesn’t that mean only ‘down’? But the example written in the paragraph above says it will stretch only ‘across’. And in any case, weather only ‘down’ or only ‘across’, this means again that stretching a form to overcome changes in screen resolutions becomes impossible, because not everything is streched. So resizing code will still be needed to accommodate for different screen resolutions. Gilad

I'd appreciate if there was an option to zoom the whole Access app window, something like we have in IE7 (Ctrl+ to zoom in, Ctrl- to zoom out); especially for new generation of hi-res LCD monitors.

Off Topic:

Sorry to hijack these comments. Is Access 2007 runtime version 2 meant to work with Office Live. All it does for me is corrupt my .accdb. I have sent an e-mail via the e-mail link on this blog, but have not heard anything. I appreciate that this is not a help desk, but corrupting a database beyond repair is not good. It happens every time if the .accdb contains a link to an Office Live list, but not if it is a "normal" .accdb file, i.e. one with no link to Office Live. If I remember correctly, version 1 of the runtime didn't corrupt anything though synchronization did not work. I have set up my own version of synchronization, but can't try it out as the .accdb dies on opening. Alan

Alan,

We haven't heard about this issue before. We will investigate and get back to you directly.