Controls Collection

The Controls collection contains all of the controls on a form, report, or subform, within another control, or attached to another control. The Controls collection is a member of a Form, Report, and SubForm objects.

Using the Controls Collection

You can enumerate individual controls, count them, and set their properties in the Controls collection. For example, you can enumerate the Controls collection of a particular form and set the Height property of each control to a specified value.

Tip   The For Each...Next statement is useful for enumerating a collection.

It is faster to refer to the Controls collection implicitly, as in the following examples, which refer to a control called NewData on a form named OrderForm. Of the following syntax examples, Me!NewData is the fastest way to refer to the control.

Me!NewData               ' Or Forms!OrderForm!NewData.

Me![New Data]            ' Use if control name contains space.

Me("NewData")            ' Performance is slightly slower.

You can also refer to an individual control by referring explicitly to the Controls collection.

Me.Controls!NewData      ' Or Forms!OrderForm.Controls!NewData.

Me.Controls![New Data]

Me.Controls("NewData")

Additionally, you can refer to a control by its index in the collection. The Controls collection is indexed beginning with zero.

Me(0)                    ' Refer to first item in collection.

Me.Controls(0)

Note   You can use the Me keyword to represent a form or report within code only if you're referring to the form or report from code within the form module or report module. If you're referring to a form or report from a standard module or a different form's or report's module, you must use the full reference to the form or report.

To work with the controls on a section of a form or report, use the Section property to return a reference to a Section object. Then refer to the Controls collection of the Section object.

Two types of Control objects, the tab control and option group control, have Controls collections that can contain multiple controls. The Controls collection belonging to the option group control contains any option button, check box, toggle button, or label controls in the option group.

The tab control contains a Pages collection, which is a special type of Controls collection. The Pages collection contains Page objects. Page objects are also controls. The ControlType property constant for a Page control is acPage. A Page object, in turn, has its own Controls collection, which contains all the controls on an individual page.

Other Control objects have a Controls collection that can contain an attached label. These controls include the text box, option group, option button, toggle button, check box, combo box, list box, command button, bound object frame, and unbound object frame controls.