Form Size

[PPCO]

I have a form that is 22" high. How do I make it even longer? It has a couple
of page breaks and sub forms on it. Won't let me re-size past the 22" (gives
error: "number is to large"). Seems like a simple problem but can't figure it
out. Thanks!

 

[John Spencer MVP]

22 inches is the MAXIMUM size for any section in a report. The total maximum
size of a report is in design view is 200 inches.

So you can add a group header and group footer and gain another 44 inches of
design space. If you base the header and footer on the same sort as the
detail section then you can use the additional space.

One problem you may have is that a report is limited to 754 controls (over the
lifetime of the report). So you could run into that limit even if you have
enough space. AHHH! but the trick here is that a sub-report counts as one
control and a sub-report can have 754 controls of its own.

AND that is another trick you have available. You can set the height of a
subreport control to a tenth of an inch and set it's can grow property to YES
and it will expand. It only takes a tenth of an inch in design view.

John Spencer
Access MVP 2002-2005, 2007-2009
The Hilltop Institute
University of Maryland Baltimore County

 

[John Spencer MVP]

Forget what I said. I was writing forms but thinking reports.

You can use the form header and form footer to expand the available area.
HOWEVER, I would use a tab control and break the form into pages on the tab
and I would definitely be using sub-forms on the tabs.

John Spencer
Access MVP 2002-2005, 2007-2009
The Hilltop Institute
University of Maryland Baltimore County

 

[PPCO]

Maybe some more background...I'm designing the form to be used with a touch
screen; so everything needs to be large. And I would prefer it to be a
continuous form. The third page unfortunately shows up at the end of the
second page on the form so that's why I was hoping to be able to extend it.
Unless I'm missing something with page breaks that would allow me to leave
only a little gap between pages in design view--looked like I had to match
everything up to the size of the screen. If I did go the tab rout, is there a
way to enlarge the tabs themselves? Thanks for all your help.

 

[John Spencer MVP]

The tab control can be as large as the screen.

The tabs indicators can be enlarged by changing the font size - select the tab
control and then select the font size property and change it to a larger size.

Or you can have fixed widths and/or fixed heights for the tabs by setting the
relevant property

OR you can choose to have no tabs present and add a button to the display that
will allow you to move next or move previous using some vba to set the tab
page. Here is a bit of sample code that will rotate through the tab pages.

Private Sub btnChangeTab_Click()
Dim iTab As Integer
iTab = Me.TabCtLPages.Pages.Count - 1
If Me.TabCtLPages = iTab Then
Me.TabCtLPages = 0
Else
Me.TabCtLPages = Me.TabCtLPages + 1
End If
End Sub

You can use similar logic to code a button to go back through the tabs.


Remember that you still have a limit of 754 controls over the lifetime of the
form, so if you need this much space, you are almost surely going to have to
use subforms on the tabs to keep the number of controls under control.
(Sorry, couldn't resist).

John Spencer
Access MVP 2002-2005, 2007-2009
The Hilltop Institute
University of Maryland Baltimore County

 

[John W. Vinson]

If I did go the tab rout, is there a
way to enlarge the tabs themselves? Thanks for all your help.

The Tab Control can be expanded to the full size of the form (22" x 22") and
you can have multiple tab pages. You can't get bigger than that, though.

 

[Peter Hibbs]

PPCO,

I don't know anything about Touch Screen technology but if the act of
touching an area of the screen is simulating a mouse click in that
area then I suggest that you use a Flex Grid control.

I assume that you are trying to use a very large form with multiple
controls so that you can move the form up or down to show different
controls when the user selects different options. If you can use a
Flex Grid control you would need just one control that covers the
whole screen area (something like a spreadsheet) so that when the user
clicks (touches) a cell you write code to change the Flex Grid display
or perform some action depending on the cell selected.

See :-
http://www.rogersaccesslibrary.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=180
for a Flex Grid demo that shows something similar to this.

HTH

Peter Hibbs.

 

[James A. Fortune]

The Tab Control can be expanded to the full size of the form (22" x 22") and
you can have multiple tab pages. You can't get bigger than that, though.

I agree. I suspect that the limit of 22" is based on the unit of
measurement for forms, called twips (twip is short for 'twentieth of a
point', i.e., 1/20 of 1/72 inch'), being defined as an Integer. Since
there are 1440 twips per inch and a positive Integer can only go as high
as 32767, the actual theoretical limit is 32767 / 1440 or about 22.75486
inches. Since the Height Property or the Width Property of a Form's
Detail section won't allow you to put in more than 22 inches, I suspect
that a design decision was made that you cannot have the height or width
of a form be more than what can fit on two stacked standard sheets of 8
1/2 by 11 paper. Since a twip is an Integer rather than, say, a Double
or a Long, the resolution for placing anything on a form can get no
finer than 0.05 point (about 0.0007", a little under a mil), thus making
the twip act analogous to a pixel. Perhaps using the Integer datatype
for twips was a design tradeoff for form storage size or rendering
speed. Does anyone have more information about Microsoft's reasoning
process from long ago?

James A. Fortune
(e-mail address removed)

 

[James A. Fortune]

or a Long, the resolution for placing anything on a form can get no
finer than 0.05 point (about 0.0007", a little under a mil), thus making
the twip act analogous to a pixel.

BTW, you'll notice that sometimes when you put a specific value in for,
say, a height or width property with lots of precision, that Access will
change the value, presumably to fit at an integer number of twips.

James A. Fortune
(e-mail address removed)

 

[PPCO]

That will do the trick. Thanks everyone for the help!

 

[James A. Fortune]

... The total
maximum size of a report is in design view is 200 inches.

That's a very interesting number. It turns out that the largest PDF
file you can make before starting to sacrifice resolution is 200 inches
(14400 points or 16 2/3 ft) in width and height. Since that number
appears to be unrelated to any obvious implementation limits it's
possible that Adobe simply chose the largest report that Access can
create as a maximum size . From the PDF Reference 1.7, pp. 1129-1129:

"In Acrobat viewers earlier than version 4.0, the minimum allowed page
size is 72 by 72 units in default user space (1 by 1 inch); the maximum
is 3240 by 3240 units (45 by 45 inches). In Acrobat versions 5.0 and
later, the minimum allowed page size is 3 by 3 units (approximately 0.04
by 0.04 inch); the maximum is 14,400 by 14,400 units (200 by 200 inches).

Beginning with PDF 1.6, the size of the default user space unit may be
set with the UserUnit entry of the page dictionary. Acrobat 7.0
supports a maximum UserUnit value of 75,000, which gives a maximum page
dimension of 15,000,000 inches (14,400 * 75,000 * 1/27). The minimum
UserUnit value is 1.0 (the default)."

Note that the 0.04 inch minimum is for the size of the entire page
itself. The resolution for placing things like vector graphics and text
is amazingly fine since decimal fractions of a point can be specified.
In a PDF file, the overall resolution of any image is based on the
number of RGB values it contains combined with the dimensions you
specify for page display, but since a PDF file can get as large as 10
Gb, if you really need to you can specify something pretty fine that
will not even get close to getting grainy even when zooming to 6400%.
Plus, images usually compress well so you might be able to get about 60
Gb of image data into a PDF file that large. Digital cameras' memory
size per photograph should stay under that limit for at least a little
while!

James A. Fortune
(e-mail address removed)