should i close inactive forms

[Mclaren]

I have my navigation page which has 8 subforms. My on-load event hides all subforms. I have 8 buttons which, when each is clicked, first hides all forms and unhides the form that matches the button clicked.

I have done this so that if a user is busy on one form and needs to go to another, when he returns to the first form, he will return to the record he was busy with. This is not a must, but i find it to be a user friendly way of working.

With the DB still in design stage and very little test data in the tables, will this, in future, slow the DB down, or should i close each form and only open it only when required ?

[pbaldy]

My first thought was that it would be better to have a form with 1 subform control, and your buttons would place the appropriate subform into that control. That way, you are only access one set of data at a time. A form with 8 subforms could conceivably load pretty slowly if there's a lot of data.

A wrinkle in that would be returning to the same record, but I think there would be ways around that.