If you have a nice big widescreen monitor but your Microsoft Access forms still feel like they are trapped in a tiny little box, Microsoft has some good news for you. Access now supports big forms, giving you much more room to build wide dashboards, spread out controls, display charts, and make everything easier to read without shrinking the font down to microscopic size.
This is a new Microsoft 365 Access feature, and the basic idea is wonderfully simple: an individual form can now have a much larger design surface than it could before. You do not need VBA, special form properties, or any complicated workaround just to make the form wider. Open the form in Design View, drag the right edge farther out, save the form, and you have more canvas to work with.
For years, Access forms had a practical width limit of roughly 22 inches. That was plenty back when most people were working on smaller monitors, but modern displays are a different story. If you have a large desktop monitor, especially an ultrawide display, it is easy to feel like Access is wasting a lot of perfectly good screen real estate.
With big forms, you can continue expanding the form design area well beyond the old limitation. Microsoft says forms can now extend to around 200 inches. No, you probably do not need a form that is 200 inches wide. Although I have learned never to say never when it comes to what people will build in Access.
The obvious use for this is a dashboard. You can keep customer information on the left, place a sales chart in the center, add a pie chart or summary figures on the right, and still have enough breathing room that the form does not look like someone packed it with a shoehorn.
Wide forms are also useful for operational screens where you need several pieces of information visible at once. For example, you might have customer details, recent orders, account notes, open support cases, and key totals all on one form. Previously, that often meant creating tabs, stacking subforms, or making the user scroll around. Those techniques still have their place, of course, but now you have more layout options.
Another benefit is readability. As I get older, I find myself appreciating bigger fonts and more spacing between controls. You can make labels easier to see, give text boxes some room, and make charts large enough to actually be useful. A chart that is three inches wide may technically be a chart, but it is not always a chart anyone can read.
To try it yourself, open an existing form in Design View. Scroll to the right side of the form and drag the form boundary outward. You can also increase the height if you need more vertical space. Then save the form and open it in Form View to see how it looks.
Keep in mind that Access will not automatically rearrange your existing controls. Making the canvas larger does not magically redesign the form for you. You still need to decide what belongs in that new space, how far apart controls should be, and whether the layout makes sense for the people who will actually use the database.
That last part is important. A form that looks fantastic on your 34-inch monitor may be a mess on someone else's laptop. Their display may have a lower resolution, different Windows scaling, larger text settings, or simply less available screen width. Before you turn every form in your database into the Access equivalent of a movie theater screen, think about where it will be used.
Check the form on the computers your users actually have. Look at display scaling, font sizes, buttons near the far right edge, and anything that might disappear off-screen. The newer Access zoom features can help in some situations, but zooming is not the same thing as having a layout that works well on a smaller display.
There is another big compatibility issue to consider before sharing these forms. The recipient needs a version of Access that supports large form dimensions. Microsoft lists Microsoft 365 Access version 2609, with the appropriate build number or later, as the starting point for this feature.
That means someone using an older perpetual version of Access, such as Access 2021 or Access 2024, may not have support for these larger forms. If you send them a database containing a form that exceeds the old limits, that form may not open properly on their machine. Nothing says "fun support call" quite like someone telling you the main dashboard will not open.
You can check your own Access version by going to File > Account > About Access. Also remember that Microsoft 365 features are often rolled out gradually. You may have a reasonably current build and still not see the feature immediately. The practical test is simple: open a form in Design View and see whether Access actually lets you expand it beyond the old boundary.
If your organization manages Office updates, you may need to talk to the IT department about whether your Access installation is on the correct update channel. Yes, I know. Talking to IT. Try to remain calm.
When you start converting important forms, it is smart to keep a backup copy. You might duplicate a form first and give the new version a clear name such as CustomerFBig or BigCustomerF. The exact naming convention is up to you. Just make sure "big" is in there somewhere so that six months from now you remember why there are two versions of the same form.
Big forms also work nicely with overlapping windows. If you use overlapping windows instead of tabbed documents, you can position multiple forms side by side across a wide display. Put the customer form on the left, an order form on the right, perhaps a dashboard or chart in the middle, and you can work with several parts of the database at once.
There are still some limitations involving form positioning and older VBA layout code. In particular, Access has a roughly 32,000-twip positioning limit in some situations. So while the form itself can be much larger now, code that moves forms or controls around may still need special handling when you get far out to the right side of a very wide layout.
The basic big-form feature does not require any code at all. However, if you are building sophisticated wide-screen layouts, automatically positioning forms, or lining up multiple large forms across a monitor, the VBA details matter. The embedded video demonstrates the feature, and the extended developer material goes into those positioning limits and some tricks for working around them.
Overall, this is a very welcome improvement for Access users with modern displays. It gives dashboards room to breathe, makes charts more useful, and lets you create cleaner layouts without cramming everything into the same old narrow form width. Just make sure your users have a compatible version of Access before you deploy your new giant masterpiece.
Watch the embedded video for the full walkthrough and a look at big forms in action.
Live long and prosper,
RR
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