Access 2007 - Why Can’t I Arrange My Fields On A Form?

You’ve created an access form in Office 2007 by clicking on the Create Form button. All the fields are the same width. Now you want to make one a bit narrower. But when you select it and drag the side, all the fields get narrower. How do you change the width of one field?

When you click on Create Form with an existing table highlighted, Access 2007 creates a form with all fields the same width.

If you try to change the width of the Employee ID field, all the fields will change. Soon you discover the Remove button in the Change Layout group on the Arrange Ribbon.

But when you click on it, the Employee ID field seems to disappear. Actually it goes behind the next field, and no matter how you seem to try to drag the fields on the form, they just don’t go where you would like. That’s because when creating a form in this way, Access controls the layout of the fields, and seems to use something similar to a Word Table Generator. So you think, “I’ll just design the whole thing manually like I used to in 2003. Well, you don’t have to. If you think like a Word user, you need to “turn the table into text” so that you can rearrange the fields. To do this, click on the button that appears at the top left of the first field on the form, similar to selecting an entire table in Microsoft Word. This will highlight all the fields in the form. Now click on the Remove button to remove the automatic (table) formatting from all the fields at once.

Click on an unused part of the form to de-select all the fields. You can now select one field and change the size of that field without affecting the other fields on the form.

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