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A shortcut (pop-up) menu appears whenever you right-click a form or a report in preview mode. If you leave the built-in menus in place, the shortcut menu will include the Design View command. Naturally, you probably won’t want this command to be available in a protected database, so let’s find out how to build a custom shortcut menu that replaces the built-in Form View shortcut menu:

1. Select the View menu, choose Toolbars and choose the Customize dialog, select the Toolbars tab, and create a new menu.

2. Click the Properties button and select Popup from the Type drop-down list. This action brings up a message box, shown in Figure 7-11, that tells you that the menu is about to disappear and that you will have to find it
again. Weird, but true!

3. Click OK and then click Close.

  <<Click picture to enlarge

Figure 7-11. The message invoked when you make a toolbar into a shortcut
(pop-up) menu.

4. To start adding commands to your new shortcut menu, choose the Toolbars tab.

5. Select the Shortcut Menus check box (as shown in Figure 7-12). Find the new shortcut menu under the Custom menu on the right side of the Shortcut Menus bar.

Figure 7-12. Displaying shortcut menus with other toolbars.

6. Now that you have found the new shortcut menu, you can drag and drop all the record and form-related commands onto the menu, such as the Form View menu that I have built in Figure 7-13.

Figure 7-13. A demonstration of a Form View shortcut menu.

Whenever you want to edit the shortcut menu further, you need to open the Customize dialog, select the Toolbars tab, and select the Shortcut Menus check box. Alternatively, you can find your shortcut menu by selecting the menu you want with the drop-down list at the top of the Toolbars tab.

Integrating Menus into Your Forms and Reports

Adding a toolbar or menu to your Access user interface requires no more than changing a few properties on your forms and reports. These properties are the Menu Bar, Toolbar, Shortcut Menu, and Shortcut Menu Bar, and they can be found in the Other tab of the Form properties dialog (shown in Figure 7-14). To add a custom menu or toolbar to a form, open the form in design view and show the form’s Properties dialog. Now select the Other tab to add your custom menus to a form.

Figure 7-14. Adding custom menus and toolbars to your form.

Sample Databases

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