USING COMMAND BARS

Although command bars are very useful, in that you use basically the same method for creating the three types of command bars, they can each be confusing. Figure 20.1 shows all three types of command bars: menus, toolbars, and shortcut menus. You can find this form, frmShowEachTypeOfControl, and the other examples in this chapter in Chap20.mdb, located in the ExamplesChap20 folder on the accompanying CD-ROM.

Creating different types of command bars in Access 2000 isn't much different from creating toolbars in prior versions. To create the different types of commands in the user interface, from the View menu choose Toolbars and then Customize. The Customize dialog that appears has three page tabs: Toolbars, Commands, and Options.

The Customize Dialog's Toolbars Page

The default page, Toolbars, shows all the toolbars and menus in the current database. Scroll the Toolbars list to see the standard toolbars and your custom toolbars and menus (see Figure 20.2). Toolbars now visible have check marks by their entries.

The Shortcut Menus choice in this list is what you use to modify and store the shortcut menu–type command bars. These will be discussed later in this chapter, in the section “Creating Menus and Shortcut Menu–Type Command Bars.” The Toolbars page of the Customize dialog also has these command buttons:

• New creates a new command bar.

• Rename renames a command bar.

• Delete deletes a command bar.

• Reset resets a standard command bar to the default commands for that specific command bar.

• Properties lets you customize all the command bars (the Toolbar Properties dialog is discussed later, in the section “Adding a Custom Toolbar Button That Calls Your Own VBA Function”).

• The Assistant button (with the Question mark) is available to answer your questions.

• Close closes the dialog and saves your changes.

The Customize Dialog's Commands Page

The Customize dialog's Commands page is where you place individual standard commands on the command bar you're creating. The Categories list contains the various built-in toolbars available in Access. When you select one, the Commands list displays the commands available for that particular toolbar.

When you select a command, the Description button becomes enabled. Click it to display a description of the command being used (see Figure 20.3).

The last button on this page, Modify Selection, is enabled when you click a command on an existing displayed toolbar. Click this button to display the toolbar command's individual property sheet. (This property sheet is discussed later in the section “Adding a Custom Toolbar Button That Calls Your Own VBA Function.”)

Options Tab of the Customize Dialog

The Options page of the Customize dialog contains some options for all the command bar types and how they respond to the user (see Figure 20.4). The first option, Standard and Formatting Toolbars Share One Row, specifies just that: whether to have the standard and formatting toolbars share the same row.

To return to the default set of menu commands, click the Reset My Usage Data button.

The next three options affect only toolbar-type command bars:

• Large Icons affects how the icons look on the toolbars.

• Show ScreenTips on Toolbars specifies whether to show screen tips for the toolbar buttons.

• Show Shortcut Keys on ScreenTips displays the shortcut keys, such as Paste (Ctrl+V).

The last choice, Menu Animations, tells how you want the popup menu portions to pop up. Choices are None, Random, Unfold (left to right and down), and Slide (slides down).

Now that you're familiar with the tools available to create command bars, it's time to get down to work.

Creating a Toolbar Through the User Interface

In the following sections, I'll show you how to do six things:

• Initially create a custom toolbar

• Add existing commands onto the toolbar

• Specify groupings of buttons

• Add a custom toolbar button that calls your own VBA function

• Create menus and shortcut menu–type command bars

• Add the command bars to a form

None of these things are too tough to do, but you'll definitely save time and hassles by reading on.

Creating the Toolbar

Creating the toolbar itself is probably the easiest process in the Customize dialog:

That's it. After a few moments you see a very small toolbar in the center of your screen, and the toolbar list is updated with the new toolbar selected (see Figure 20.5).

Now that you have the initial toolbar, you can make it useful by adding some commands to it.

Adding Existing Commands to the Toolbar

Most command bars that you'll create will be made up of commands that already exist in Access via some other menu or toolbar. As a result, it's very convenient to can grab commands from a predefined set from the Customize dialog's Commands page.

Select the View category. Scroll down the Commands list until you see the Close command (refer to Figure 20.3). Click and drag the command from the list onto your new CustomerToolbar. You'll now see the Close command icon on your toolbar.

Now select the Records category. Scroll down the Commands list until you see the First, Previous, Next, and Last commands. Drag these commands on the new toolbar as you did with the Close command. At this point, the toolbar should look like Figure 20.6.

Specifying Button Groupings

Now that you actually have some buttons on the toolbar, it's time to look at how to group the controls. Let's keep the Close command separate from the other buttons, because it doesn't move records around. To begin a button group, right-click the command that you want to start the new group with—in this case, the First command. When you right-click the command, you will then see the popup menu. Choose Properties from the menu. The properties sheet in Figure 20.7 appears.

This properties sheet provides quite a few ways to manipulate a toolbar button. For now, you're interested in the Begin a Group property. When you click this check box, all that occurs is that a vertical bar appears between the current and prior toolbar buttons. To complete a group, you just check the Begin a Group property on the starting button for the next group.

The purpose of this chapter is to show you programmatic ways of working with command bars, so I'll let you investigate on your own the other commands on this menu, including modifying button faces. Now look at attaching your own routines to a command bar.

Adding a Custom Toolbar Button That Calls Your Own VBA Function

There's a very intuitive way to add a custom command to a toolbar. To create a command that calls your code, you need to follow these steps while still in the Customize dialog:

=CallFunctionFromCmdBar()

Function CallFunctionFromCmdBar()

   MsgBox "This function was called from a command bar"

End Function

The properties sheet should now look like Figure 20.9. Notice that the custom button is blank; this is because of the default style chosen. This will be taken care of next.

You're done with the properties sheet. Click the Close button.

The new toolbar button is almost finished, but you need to perform one more task that you'll do just about every time you create a custom toolbar command—change the button's image, also called the button face.

Suppose that you want to change this toolbar button to have the smiley face. To do so, right-click the new toolbar button. Choose Change Button Image from the shortcut menu to see the available images. Choose the smiley face. If you choose to, you can also edit the image in what amounts to a bitmap editor by choosing Edit Button Image from the popup menu. For this example, you're finished with this toolbar. You'll see how to display the toolbar on a specific form later in the “Adding Command Bars to a Form” section.

Creating Menus and Shortcut Menu–Type Command Bars

When you create a menu-type command bar, you place menus for most actions on the main level of the menu. Here's how it works:

To place a submenu on the new menu, select New Menu from the Categories list on the Customize dialog's Command page. When you select this item, the only command that will appear in the Commands list box is one of the same name: New Menu. Drag and drop this onto your menu bar.

When you click New Menu on your menu bar, a placeholder appears for your first command on the submenu. Using the techniques described earlier in the chapter, you can drag and drop commands onto the submenu—and add your own as well.

To change the submenu's caption, right-click the command and choose Properties. Then change the Caption property to reflect the name of the submenu you desire.

To create a shortcut-menu–type command bar, leave the command bar in the toolbar style until you've completed it. Then use the Toolbar Properties sheet (which you access from the Customize dialog) to change the Type to Popup.

To get to the shortcut toolbar for modification, you must choose Shortcut Menus from the Toolbars list on the Customize dialog's Toolbars page. This will display all the shortcut menus that exist on a menu, where you can then customize them. Your custom shortcut menus will show up beneath the Custom item, which is the last on the left.

Adding Command Bars to a Form

Using all three types of command bars with forms is fairly straightforward in Access 2000. (In versions before Access 97, you had to use a macro or code to activate toolbars with forms.) You can specify the names of all three types of command bars on the Other page of the Form property sheet (see Figure 20.11).

To specify the various types of command bars to use, simply fill in the name of the corresponding command bar in the property of the form, as shown in Figure 20.11 with the Menu Bar, Toolbar, and Shortcut Menu Bar properties.