Some forms and swithboards in design view show up blank in form vi

I'm a financial analyst, expert excel user, and began using Access 3 months
ago to solve a specific problem. Following along with Jeff Conrad's book, I
wrestled with the concepts until I had a fairly servicable application
designed to replace a couple of hundred spreadsheets and versions thereof. I
also built considerable strength hauling the book to and from the office, in
its own briefcase, everyday. The result is better than I expected and
especially efficient in consolidating calculations that, until now, could
only be done across a tedious network of linked worksheets. But that was my
strength going in. After getting everything to work I realized that I was
the only person able to use it. Gigantic company,tens of thousands of
workers, no reason to bother with something unfamiliar. So, I decided to
take it another step, started buiding navigation forms and switchboards to
ease the learning experience and it is here that my lack of design skill has
been exposed. Lining up the little boxes and explaining them, my hand is
hurting from the mouse. I have designed these navigation forms and
switchboards, and on some of them, a near-perfect design presentation becomes
completely blank in the form-view. When I could see the selections,I tested
most of the form controls and they worked as planned. But now that you can't
see the selections on some forms I anticipate a much harder sell on getting
people to use this application. Some of the forms just suddenly appear
blank--no matter what the design view shows. The only thing different, that
I've noticed, is that a message box now pops up on exiting Access,asks if I
want to save and name "the module," (something apparently created without my
consious effort). What's going on? I'm losing patience with the asthetics
and friendliness features everyone wants; I can prove the calculations and it
may end there if I can't solve the disappearing fields and menu items on form
view mode. The folks can still view shadowed boxes, about as functional as
the colored lines in design view.

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:53:02 -0700, abs minded
wrote:

I have designed these navigation forms and
switchboards, and on some of them, a near-perfect design presentation becomes
completely blank in the form-view.

This will happen when two conditions hold: 1) the form's Recordsource returns
no records so you can't see existing data; 2) the form is not updateable,
either because its recordsource isn't or because its Allow Additions or Allow
Edits property is set to No.

The most likely place is the form's Recordsource Query. If you open it as a
query datasheet, does it have any records? Does it have the * new record? If
not, post the SQL view of the query here (with an explanation of the tables if
it's not clear from the names). Also check the form's Filter (are you
filtering out all the records) and its Data Entry (should be No), Allow Edits
(yes), and Allow Additions (yes) properties.
--

John W. Vinson [MVP]