The most important characteristic about an option group is that it can present a list of options to a user and allow him/her to choose one and only one choice. The neat thing about option groups is that when a user clicks on one item, the other items are automatically deselected. This makes it very simple to speed things up when you need a user to make a single choice from a predefined list. The easiest way to learn about how to make an option group is to actually go through the process.

Start with a blank form in design view and then click on the toolbox icon. In the toolbox there is a small box with an XYZ.

Go ahead and click that box. Provided you have Wizards turned on (they're on by default--- if you need to turn the Wizards on check out this month's tip) you'll see the dialog box below:

On the screen, enter the labels that you would like to appear as choices in the option group.

I'm going to use Summer Camp Departments as my example. Once you enter your label names in the order you want them listed, click Next and you'll get the dialog box below.

As you can see, Access has assigned values to each label. These values are what are selected behind the scenes when the user makes a choice in the option group. By default Access will use numbers as the values stored. You could change these to something else (e.g. the label names), however I recommend you use numbers since they are easier to manipulate and more efficient to work with.

When you click next again, you'll get the dialog box below, which invites you to designate a default value.

Although you may skip assigning a default value, I recommend that choose a default since the use of the option box implies that something will be chosen. If you have a situation where the user may want to deliberately not choose one of the choices, it makes sense to include an option such as All or None. That way, the option group will always return a value you can work with.

When you hit Next again, you'll see the screen below which will allow you to make some style choices. At this point you may want to play around a bit to see what appeals to you and your users.

Click next again and you'll get an option that allows you to put a title on your option group. Finally hit Finish and your form will be similar to the picture below.

At this point you're ready to try out your form. Click the form view button (or press F5) and you'll see something like picture below. I've dressed things up a bit by adding a title to the form, creating an OK button, and toggling some of the options in the form. Click on the various options and you'll see that the form deselects one option when you choose another one.

Now that you know the basics of an option group, it becomes very simple to show users all their choices on a compact screen and help them make one selection from a set of possible options. At this point we haven't covered how we deal with the user selections - that will be the subject of the upcoming August Wizard: learning how to manipulate the user selection and other uses of option groups.

When you put an ampersand (&) in a label, Access interprets this as a call to underline the next character and turn it into a Hot Key. For instance, if you type Arts & Crafts in a label, you'll find that Access will put an underscore character between Arts & Crafts rather than an ampersand.

This is really annoying! In order to compensate for this, simply double the ampersand. When Access sees the dual ampersands, it will correctly show a single ampersand in your label.