How to set your Access display preferences

Q Access 2007 always seems to open a form, report or table in a full-screen mode with a row of tabs across the top to move between them.

It is fine to have a form, a report and a table with the same name, ­ which means learning what the little icons mean to navigate, ­ but can I change a setting to have them open in separate windows as in Access 2003?

Dale Ward

A You’re right. By default Access 2007 displays opened objects as tabbed ‘pages’ but you can choose to display objects in windows (as they were in previous versions) by changing the database options.

Click the Office button in the top left corner, click the ‘Access Options’ button and then ‘Current Database’ in the left-hand pane. In the list of Application Options, find the Document Window Options with two radio buttons below it. Select Overlapping Windows instead of Tabbed Documents and click OK. You must close and re-open the database for the change to take effect.

The default for any new database you create will be tabbed documents, but you only need to change it once and you can work with overlapping windows from then on.