Changing Default Control and Form/Report Settings

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This is one of those features that almost nobody knows about because it isn't very discoverable. In Access 2007 (and earlier), you can change the default property values for any new controls in a form or report. Here are the necessary steps:

  1. Open/Create form or report in design mode;
  2. Select the "Design" contextual tab (or the equivalent toolbar with the controls for Access 2003 and earlier);
  3. Open the Property Sheet (using the Ribbon or hitting ALT+ENTER);
  4. Notice that the property sheet caption says "Selection Type: Default <Control>";
  5. Change the properties at will;

From this point on, any new controls you create will have its default properties set to what you customized.

It's worth mentioning that any changes you make will only exist in the context of this form or report alone. However, you can also create settings that apply to all newly created Forms and Report. For this purpose, follow the same steps 1-5 above, and do one more:

   6. Save the Form or Reports with the name "Normal";

If there is a "Normal" (like Word's Normal.dot) form, all new forms will inherit its settings. The same goes for reports, but notice that form settings cannot be inherited by reports and vice-versa. Of course, if you delete the "Normal" form or report, you will not affect the default settings of the already created forms and reports since they already inherited them. Only newly form and reports from then on will not inherit the settings anymore.

This is a very neat feature to speed up creating a number of forms and reports that will use similarly set controls (or width/height even) without having to go through multiple copy and paste runs.