Office 2007 Product Key Convert a TextBox to a Co

Today's guest blogger is Pavlo Pedan of ARGO Business Corp. He has 15 years of experience with Access and has a great site of tips  at Some people do not like having ComboBoxes on a form because of drop-down buttons. Microsoft offers a solution here,Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, but this approach does not work for a datasheet view – the drop-down button shows up when the ComboBox gets the focus. Some people do not like ComboBoxes because the control requires some time to be populated from its row source. The row source could be remote and/or could be based on complex calculations. On the other hand,Office 2010, we actually need selection features of ComboBox only while editing respective field. Often we do not need all
this overhead while simply navigating through records (unless we want to see data from a different column of the ComboBox). While a ComboBox can be populated dynamically while entering symbols (see this great article from Allen Browne),Office 2010 Key, the other approach is to get rid of the ComboBox itself while just displaying records and get it involved only when necessary. Please have a look at my short video demo and download the VirtualComboBoxDemo sample database here. When left-clicked or Alt+Down is pressed,Windows 7 Ultimate Key, a pop-up non-modal form that contains only one ComboBox shows up exactly over the TextBox. The text part (with or without a dropdown button) can be hidden or made visible,Office 2007 Product Key, and can be made to use the AutoCorrect feature or not (see the code for details). This approach works for both Form and Datasheet views. Not much VBA programming is required. The ComboBox "converts" back to a TextBox if you press ESC, Tab or Shift+Tab, or when you click somewhere on a main form. This emulates natural ComboBox behaviour. So now we have a form with TextBoxes only! When we need ComboBox, it appears on-the-fly and disappears when we are done with selection. This has been tested with Access 2007. The usage of the clsControlLayout class is explained here. Send your Power Tips to Mike and Chris at accpower@microsoft.com. <div