Microsoft Access 2003 - Create a Form

See Microsoft Access Tutorial for a tutorial on a more recent version of Access.

As mentioned in the previous lesson, forms provide non-technical users the ability to add data to your database.

Here are the steps involved in creating a form in Access.

  1. Ensuring the "Forms" tab is selected, click "New".
  2. Select "Form Wizard" and click "OK". (For now, we'll use the "Form Wizard" to create a form. Once you become comfortable with creating forms, you can choose another option if you prefer).
    MS Access 2003: Create a form - step 2
  3. Select the fields that you need on your form and click "Next". In this case, we only need the user to enter first name and last name, so we choose those two fields:
    MS Access 2003: Create a form - step 3
  4. Choose which layout you'd like your form to use. Leave this at the default ("Columnar") and click "Next":
    MS Access 2003: Create a form - step 4
  5. Choose which style you'd like your form to use. Leave this at the default ("Clouds") and click "Next":
    MS Access 2003: Create a form - step 5
  6. Choose a name for your form and click "Finish":
    MS Access 2003: Create a form - step 6

Your form should now look something like this:

MS Access 2003: Create a form - Finished result

This is a very basic form and in most cases, you'd have a lot more fields on your form. You can see that the form is already presenting the first record in our Individual table.


Update

Since this tutorial was written, there have been many subsequent updates to Access. Here's the latest Access tutorial.