I have a large number of controls in a Base form and some of them have gone out of whack I don’t know what’s wrong with them I can’t make the formatting/ alignment the same as all the others no matter what I change. Is there a way to simply copy the formatting for a similar control an and apply it to the messed up controls? The clone formatting option is greyed out.
Drag a rectangle to select all the controls in the rectangle. Right-click>Control properties…
Call Forms>Form Navigator… for a dockable window showing all forms and their controls in a hierarchical view. In that window you can also select multiple controls with Ctrl+Click and get their properties from the context menu.
All right. I have several more gripes:
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Why can’t you use “Clone Formatting” to copy formats of one control to another, instead of wasting my time tediously adjusting the properties of each control that is added?
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Why does the control properties window not implement all of the changes I make to the properties and I have to tediously edit it multiple times to make all the changes, this is tedious and a waste of time.
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Why do the side scroll bars in popup windows not page up and down when you click above or below the ‘cursor’ and you have to drag the cursor with the mouse tediously by hand therefore wasting more time?
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Why is the “Add Field” button sometimes not displayed in the toolbar and cannot be restored no matter what I do until it magically reappears for some unknown reason?
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Why do the Display Grid, Snap to Grid, and Helplines When Moving buttons do nothing when clicked?
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Why do added fields never match the alignment of existing fields and cannot be manually adjusted to match them?
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Why does clicking off the form control into an unused space to clear the pointer focus cause the form to re-center at the top left of the page, this is very tedious to have to constantly correct and yet another big waste of time.
One tread - one question. I only answer to the first “Clone Formatting”:
There are many properties available for form controls. Much more properties as they are available, for example, for a cell in Calc. And many of the properties are only properties for a specific kind of control like text boxes or list boxes.
Form controls you use in Base had been created a long time ago. They work this way since LO has been created as a for of OpenOffice. Nobody thought about cloning of formatting at the time this kind of controls have been created.
The properties of a control aren’t part of the properties like styles in the sidebar. This is really a problem when exporting forms to PDF and the fonts, which are defined in a control, aren’t exported. But when I see the open bugs in Base I don’t see any person who could help to get this working a better way as it works today.
If you don’t connect to some existing database, create your own database tables with proper field types and relations.
Then create the input forms to edit the related tables, ignoring any formatting. Just concentrate on the mere functionality.
Finally, adjust the layout and formatting. This can be done by specifying the common properties of selected controls.
Forms and their controls are attached to documents. The embedding Writer document is just a canvas unrelated to the attached forms.
The items of the “form application” don’t have any styles nor templates. If formatting of form controls is really important to you, just create some Writer document with a dummy form and a bunch of pre-formatted form controls which can be copied into other form documents. Then open the form navigator, drag the pasted form controls to the actual forms and add the data bindings on the “Data” tab.
How do you handle a large form like mine where there is a long list of items like a checklist. I want to put groups of controls on separate tabs, and now I’m sorry I ever started using Base, I’m not a programmer, I don’t want to learn all the details of some programming language so I can just do one thing I want to do.
Forget Base. Buy some database development suite (Access, Filemaker). SQL is the programming language you can’t get around. Not using SQL is like designing a spreadsheet without formulas.