Size of Access Form

[CCWT]

We recently installed new monitors on our computers - new ones are flat
screen, old were CRT. Problem is, because of the change in screen area and
viewable area, our Access forms are now very small and we can't *zoom* it to
enlarge it to fill our screen (like can be done with Word or Excel - simply
zoom it larger). I notice Zoom is in the View dropdown menu but is grayed
out. Can we enlarge the form easily and still keep the new screen area?? We
are using Access 2000.

Thanks in advance for any help provided.

 

[Rick Brandt]

We recently installed new monitors on our computers - new ones are
flat screen, old were CRT. Problem is, because of the change in
screen area and viewable area, our Access forms are now very small
and we can't *zoom* it to enlarge it to fill our screen (like can be
done with Word or Excel - simply zoom it larger). I notice Zoom is in
the View dropdown menu but is grayed out. Can we enlarge the form
easily and still keep the new screen area?? We are using Access 2000.

Thanks in advance for any help provided.

If you cannot comfortably read the text on the forms then your resolution
setting is too high or you need to change your Windows Font-Size setting.

What you're seeing has the same effect on every program you run, not just
Access. Yes, Word and Excel have zoom settings but that doesn't affect the font
size in menus or message boxes, etc.. If you have trouble reading your Access
forms I would expect you to have the same problems reading those items as well.

 

[CCWT]

If you cannot comfortably read the text on the forms then your resolution
setting is too high or you need to change your Windows Font-Size setting.

What you're seeing has the same effect on every program you run, not just
Access. Yes, Word and Excel have zoom settings but that doesn't affect the font
size in menus or message boxes, etc.. If you have trouble reading your Access
forms I would expect you to have the same problems reading those items as well.

Rick Brandt, Microsoft Access MVP

No problem with menus, messages - we had.already increased the Windows font
size to "Other" - 105% which makes menus, message boxes, etc., a nice size
for all of us. We have the resolution at 1024x768. We like it this way
because it does give a bigger screen area for most applications. Only
problem we've come across is Access. The menu font size is larger than the
font in the fields on our forms and I was hoping there was an easy solution
to just zoom it a bit larger on the form without having to go in and
manually change the font size on the entire form because it is 8 tabs of
information with lots of fields on each tab.

 

[Rick Brandt]

No problem with menus, messages - we had.already increased the
Windows font size to "Other" - 105% which makes menus, message boxes,
etc., a nice size for all of us. We have the resolution at 1024x768.
We like it this way because it does give a bigger screen area for
most applications. Only problem we've come across is Access. The
menu font size is larger than the font in the fields on our forms and
I was hoping there was an easy solution to just zoom it a bit larger
on the form without having to go in and manually change the font size
on the entire form because it is 8 tabs of information with lots of
fields on each tab.

Generally speaking you should only increase the resolution setting when moving
to a larger display such that the increase in the physical size of the display
combined with the increase in the resolution setting results in font sizes that
are about the same as with the older, smaller display. Sounds like you were
either running a below average resolution on the old displays or are running a
higher than average resolution on the new ones.

Often there is a temptation to run at the highest setting that the display and
video card will allow because of a "higher is better" mindset. Of course with
LCD displays there is a "native resolution" that the display is optimized for
and that is the setting you would ordinarily want to use.

The font-size setting for Windows should have made the text in your Access forms
larger. Are you saying it did not or just not enough? If you are not happy
with it about all you can do is try an even larger font size setting (you can
tweak down individual font sizes if that makes some of them too large), lower
the resolution setting, or re-design all of your forms to use larger fonts.

There are code examples and utilities you can obtain that allow you to scale an
Access form as you change its window size or based on the current resolution
setting. I normally don't recommend them because people usually want to use
them to make forms smaller on lo-res displays (which they are not very good at),
but they do work fairly well to make forms larger on hi-res displays. One such
utility is called ShrinkerStretcher (or similar). If you Google on that term
you should find their web site.