Auto Complete like Excel

[Guest]

In Excel, when a cell has text listed, and you start to type the same text in
another cell, it automatically puts the text in there for you. How can I
duplicate this for my fields in Access? I'm using a form to fill out
information.

 

[Guest]

Combo boxes will autocomplete like Excel.

 

[John Vinson]

In Excel, when a cell has text listed, and you start to type the same text in
another cell, it automatically puts the text in there for you. How can I
duplicate this for my fields in Access? I'm using a form to fill out
information.

If you use a Combo Box it will do so automatically. If you're filling
the same value in many rows, it's a very good idea to use a combo
anyway, just to prevent spelling errors.

John W. Vinson[MVP]

 

[Jeff Boyce]

The autocomplete feature of a combo box works particularly well when the
combo box refers to a table (or a query of a table). I suspect that what
Excel does is start an internal "table" of responses to allow it to
autocomplete.

If you take a look in the tablesdbdesign newsgroup, you'll see that using
"lookup tables" is the generally-accepted approach (and doing so in forms).
You'll also see that using "lookup fields" (in tables) is NOT.

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Office/Access MVP

 

[Guest]

I'm not using a combo box. I have a "Requested By" field. The "requestor may
be the same person as we had before, it may be a new person, so a combo box
doesn't work. I need to be able to type in names but I would like the name to
Auto populate if it already exists in the table. Any Ideas?

 

[Jeff Boyce]

In Access, you use a combo box. If you set the combo box property "Auto
Expand" to yes, this is the same as auto-populate, when the name is already
in the table that the combo box uses. If you set the LimitToList property
to Yes, you can (and have to) use the NotInList event to pop open a form via
which the new name is added.

As far as I know, there's no Excel-like, automatic way to do this. It
requires a bit of programming/coding, and using the events and properties.

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Office/Access MVP