Access 97 hyperlinks make quick connections


Tip
Access 97 offers many new features, but the ones with the most sparkle are all Internet related: the Web toolbar, the Publish to the Web Wizard, a Hyperlink tool for the form and report designers, and the new Hyperlink field type for tables. If you don't go on the Web, you may think you have no use for them.
Not so!
You can add hyperlinks to Access 97 forms, reports, and tables to create your own information highway. Hyperlinks are easier to create than macros and provide faster connections.
As you may know, a hyperlink is a piece of text on a Web page that you click to jump to another location on the Net. Behind the scenes, a hyperlink is associated with a URL (uniform resource locator) that points to another Web address.
In Access 97, you can create hyperlinks to navigate between tables, forms, and reports in a database or to jump to another Microsoft Office object. The form shown in Figure 1 has two hyperlinks: one that opens another form in the open database (maybe one in which you specify more detail) and another that jumps to a Word document (perhaps a report to the boss adding narrative detail).


Figure 1

There are two ways to include hyperlinks in Access. One is to click the Insert Hyperlink tool on the Form Design toolbar (in forms only); the other is to add a hyperlink field to a table or a form. (You can also put a hyperlink on a report, but it will work only if you export the report to Word, Excel, or an HTML file.)
But which technique should you use? Simple -- if you always want to jump to the same place, no matter what record you happen to be viewing, the Hyperlink tool is the way to go. If you need to store a different "jump" address in each record of a table, use a hyperlink field.
Figure 1 shows an example of each case. The hyperlink that opens the Expense Categories form was added to the design of the Expense Reports form with the Hyperlink tool. The address to the Word document June Sales Trip sits in a hyperlink field in the Expense Reports table. I'll show you how to create both types.

Add a hyperlink to a form

1. Open a form in design mode; click the Insert Hyperlink tool on the Form Design toolbar.
2. In the Insert Hyperlink dialogue box, click the Browse button next to Named location in file (optional), click the Forms tab in the Select Location dialogue box, and double-click the name of the form you want to link to (see Figure 2). Click OK to close the Insert Hyperlink dialogue box.
3. Select the hyperlink; drag it from the upper left corner of the design window to where you want it to appear.
4. Edit the label, if you like. I changed the default term Form Expense Categories to the shorter Expense Categories.
5. Right-click the label and select from the menu to change the font colour or other properties, if need be.



Figure 2

Add a hyperlink field to a table

1. Open the table in design mode, then add a new field and assign this field the Hyperlink data type. For this example, I added the hyperlink field Trip Report to the Expense Reports table. Save your change to the table.
2. To enter a hyperlink address in the Datasheet view, first move the cursor over to the hyperlink field, and then click the Insert Hyperlink tool.
3. Click the Browse button next to Link to file or URL, and in the Link to File dialogue box, find the file you want to jump to. (I chose \My Documents\June Sales Trip.doc.) Double-click the file name, then click OK in the Insert Hyperlink dialogue box to insert the address in the field.

Add a hyperlink field to a form

1. Open the form in design view, highlight a text object for another field, and select Edit--Duplicate from the main menu.
2. Drag the copied text object to its new location on the form, right-click it, and choose Properties.
3. Set the Control Source setting to the name of the hyperlink field, and change the label to match.
- Celeste Robinson

Moving around in Word Pro 96 or 97 is a lot easier ifyou know a few keyboard shortcuts. While World Pro uses all the normal Windows keyboard shortcuts, it also has a few tricks of its own, and they're well worth memorising


Category: Data management
Issue: Aug 1997
Pages: 174-175

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