Tables Looks

Introduction:
Sometimes tables look boring, but it is up to you change that. You have two courses of action here. You can work on your table looks for navigation purposes, thus making your users life easier, in case you give them access to your tables. You can also improve the resolution of your tables by temporarily hiding columns that you don't need.

Column Width:
You can control a field's size in different ways. If you just want the column to fit its widest entry, you can double-click the right border of the column header.

1. Open the Employees2 database and double-click the tblEmployees table to open it in Datasheet View.
2. Place your mouse on the right border of the MI column until the mouse pointer becomes a vertical line, then double-click. This resizes the column width to fit the widest entry. You can also set a fixed width for a column. For example, a column that represents people's membership number to a club usually follows a set pattern. In our Library3 database, all employee's numbers have the same width since they are meant to enclose ten characters.

• Click in the Employee # column and from the main menu, click Format -> Column Width. The Column Width dialog box allows you to set the width.
• In the Column Width edit box, type 13 and click OK.
  
• The last resource you have you have is to enlarge or shrink a column width manually. Place your mouse on the of the right border of the E-Mail Address title column until the mouse pointer becomes a vertical line, press and hold the mouse and move it left and right until it gets the width you want.

Row Height:

If you want to use more height space than set by default, you can change the row height using the Row Height dialog box.

1. With the tblEmployees table still open and any of its cells has focus, from the main menu, click Format -> Row Height. In the Row Height edit box, type 20 and press Enter.
   
2. Close the tblEmployees table.

Controlling The Table's Font Properties:

You can use the Font... menu to set the font of data on a table.

1. The Employees2 database should still be opened. Open the tblEmployees2 table in Datasheet View.
2. From the main menu, click Format -> Font...
3. Using the Font dialog box, you can change the font displayed on the table.
   Change the font face to either Verdana; if you don't have Verdana, choosse Tahoma;
   otherwise choose MS Sans Serif. Set the font style to Bold, keep the font size to 10 and change the color to Blue. Then click OK.
   
4. When necessary, adjust and change different column widths to display their contents
   accordingly.

Datasheet Formatting:

The Datasheet menu allows you to control the gridlines looks on a table.

1. From the main menu, click Format -> Datasheet...
2. In the Datasheet Formatting dialog box, play with different features and see what they produce. For our example, set the Cell Effect to Flat, make sure the Gridlines Shown Vertical and Horizontal check boxes are checked, set the Background to White, the Gridlines to Fuchsia, and all the Borders and Line Style as Solid. Then click OK.
3. When you have finished making adjustments, close the table and the database.

Exercises:

The GCS database

• Open the Georgetown Cleaning Services3 database..
  Open the tblCleaningOrders table in Design View.
• Set the Default Values of the items prices (the reason we are doing this is to make sure the items prices get transferred from one record to the next; if you type the price of each item in the table datasheet view or in the form, you will have to type the price every time you have a new customer... very annoying)