No Zoom in Report/Form Design View. . . STILL!!??!?!?

[Gil Grissom]

I just upgraded to Office 2003. One of my pet peaves has always been
that there is no zoom in the design view for Reports and Forms. Sure
there are kludgy work-arounds like using a magnifier, but, wtf??? Is
there are particular reason MS has decided not to make this view
zoom-able?

 

[Rick Brandt]

I just upgraded to Office 2003. One of my pet peaves has always been
that there is no zoom in the design view for Reports and Forms. Sure
there are kludgy work-arounds like using a magnifier, but, wtf??? Is
there are particular reason MS has decided not to make this view
zoom-able?

For what purpose do you think you need it? (just curious).

It seems to me that if you have trouble seeing when designing a form/report
that you would also have trouble seeing lots of other things and should
alleviate that problem with a larger display and/or a lower resolution
setting.

Is there something specific to form/report design that is harder to see?

 

[Gil Grissom]

I run at 1280x1024 because for most applications and such, this is
fine. Also, for viewing things, it isn't as critical to be precise.
However, when designing forms or reports, I want the fields and other
objects to line up precisely. Perhaps you have never designed these
things or your screen resolution is higher, so, it isn't a problem.
Currently, I use the magnifier under Accessibility. This is somewhat
ridiculous. Access should allow zooming of the entire WIP.

 

[BruceM]

In form or report design view, click a control, then hold down the Shift key
while selecting other controls. You can also drag across a group of
controls to select all of them. Once they are selected, right click and
have a look at all of the alignment and sizing options. If you are using
the design grid you can also change the GridX and GridY settings on a form
or report property sheet, so that the dots aren't as close together.
By the way, Rick has designed forms and reports, and has been providing lots
of valuable information on these and other topics for quite some time. He
may have wondered, as I did, how you will be able to view something that is
too small to format.

 

[Rick Brandt]

I run at 1280x1024 because for most applications and such, this is
fine. Also, for viewing things, it isn't as critical to be precise.
However, when designing forms or reports, I want the fields and other
objects to line up precisely. Perhaps you have never designed these
things or your screen resolution is higher, so, it isn't a problem.
Currently, I use the magnifier under Accessibility. This is somewhat
ridiculous. Access should allow zooming of the entire WIP.

There are toolbar/menu options that allows you to select multiple objects
and then align them either right, left, top, or bottom. You can also select
multiple objects and simply type the identical property value for left, or
top into the property sheet. There are also menu options for evenly
distributing multple objects both horizontally and vertically that are
handy.

I always create buttons for these menu items in my form and report design
toolbars so they are easier to use. Even if there were a magnifier I
wouldn't rely on "eye-balling" objects to align them.

 

[Vincent Johns]

I run at 1280x1024 because for most applications and such, this is
fine. Also, for viewing things, it isn't as critical to be precise.
However, when designing forms or reports, I want the fields and other
objects to line up precisely. Perhaps you have never designed these
things or your screen resolution is higher, so, it isn't a problem.
Currently, I use the magnifier under Accessibility. This is somewhat
ridiculous. Access should allow zooming of the entire WIP.

You might want to consider using MS Word, instead of Access, for your
reports. Word will zoom all over the place. You can link it to your
Access Queries via Word's "Mail Merge" facility, and you'll have plenty
of flexibility with layout design that way, maybe be able to do some
things that are kind a alien to Access (such as a formatted Table of
Contents).

When I'm laying out controls in Word (and elsewhere), I often use
MouseKeys to give me precise control over positioning, and I'm happy to
have that available. I also occasionally use Magnifier to help me
manipulate individual pixels, and it doesn't seem ridiculous to me ...
but maybe I'm not as easily amused as some people are.

-- Vincent Johns <[email protected]>
Please feel free to quote anything I say here.