Thanks to the interactive and graphical controls provided by most computer programs (including Microsoft Office) many objects can be copied, cut, pasted, and moved on your screen as easily as you could move a child’s building block set. When working with a form, Access lets you perform all of these options with your mouse.

Let’s consider the following form complete with a few basic controls:

 

 

You decide that this form is no longer completely serving your purposes and needs a little adjusting. The combo box is not needed, so it can be cut. You will use another check box, so you can copy and paste the one you already have. And everything can be shifted up in the form to account for the loss of the combo box.

To perform these actions, open the form in Design view. When you click on a form, you will see the following handles appear:

 

 

In the diagram above, the label for the combo box was clicked to select it. The large black box in the upper left-hand corner of the control is used to move the control, and the smaller boxes around the outside edge are used to expand the object in a certain dimension. Notice too how there is a large black box in the upper left-hand corner of the combo box itself; this means that the combo box is related to the label that is currently selected.

To cut the control when selected, press Ctrl + X on your keyboard. The label disappears and is placed in the clipboard of the computer, but the combo box itself stays behind. This might be useful in some scenarios to have only the combo box visible, but for this example we want to remove the entire combo box and label.

Press Ctrl + Z to undo the Cut operation, and instead click and drag a selection box around the controls:

 

 

Now press Ctrl + X to cut the control. If you are planning on removing the combo box for good, you might consider just deleting it instead; to do this, simply highlight the object(s) and press Delete on your keyboard.

Click and drag a box around the Check Box and its label, and then press Ctrl + C. This stores a copy of the control in the clipboard of the computer. Now press Ctrl + V to paste the copied check box:

 

 

The new check box is pasted, but doesn’t look very good when pasted on top of another control! Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the control up and to the right of the first check box:

 

 

Now all of the controls in the form can be moved up to occupy the space left behind by the combo box. Click and drag a selection box around all of the controls, and then use the up arrow on your keyboard to shift all of the controls to the top of the form: