Resizing Forms (Properties affecting behavior)

[ajetrumpet]

I believe I've found part of a solution to the weirdness of form behavior in Access (all versions). Here is the thread on AWF where I complained of my issues:

http://www.access-programmers.co.uk/...d.php?t=212812

And the link I am referring to in that thread is:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...terfaceChanges

Apparently, in versions 2007 and later, these form properties can all play a part in the behavior of your forms:

• auto center
• auto resize
• fit to screen
• can grow
• can shrink
• horizontal anchor
• vertical anchor

To solve my problem (hopefully permanently) and eliminate being subject to MS's unpredictable software BS, I did the following for my most recent application:

• set all forms to: Popup = yes / Modal = yes
• set all forms to: auto center = yes / auto resize = no / fit to screen = no
• set all applicable controls on all forms to: can grow = no / can shrink = no
• set all "anchoring" properties on all subform controls to: "top left"
• set all forms to: border style = thin
• set all forms to: moveable = "no"
• eliminated the use of any MS templates, such as NW forms (all of their templates seem to have uneditable schemas that require a ton of research to understand the behavior correctly)

Hopefully that helps someone else here too. I like to make things as simple as possible, which is why I completed the above steps. MS is notorious for unreasonable complications to software, which IMO is not ever needed unless you're interested in software sensationalism. The article above claims that working with these kind of features can work, and I'm sure they do, but certainly not without tedious research to get it right.

Edit



As it turns out, my efforts above still resulted in a random "tiny form" opening up at random times (forms would open up at the size of a couple pixels and barely be visible). So I've gone through the following steps to get that behavior to stop:

• set all forms to: auto center = yes / auto resize = YES / fit to screen = YES
• set all DETAIL sections to: can grow = YES / can grow = YES / auto height = YES
• everything else that I listed above I kept the same

The only issue I'm finding with these new settings is that my forms randomly resize the detail sections on my continuous forms so that the bottom of the form sits right below the first record (even if there are multiple records on the form). This is the only behavior I can't seem to fix at this point and it is related to all of the 5 form objects that I have that are shown in "continuous forms" style and they all have exactly the sample properties set and similar sources (table name in the SQL is the only change).