ACC: How to Negate CTRL+ENTER in a Text Box or Memo Control

• Microsoft Access versions 2.0, 7.0, 97

SUMMARY

Moderate: Requires basic macro, coding, and interoperability skills.

In Microsoft Access, a user may insert a carriage return/line feed into a bound text box by pressing CTRL+ENTER. This key combination is a Windows shortcut recognized by all Microsoft Office products, including Microsoft Access. However, in certain situations, you may want to prevent the user from inserting a carriage return/line feed into a given text box. This article demonstrates a user-defined Sub procedure that you can use to intercept these keystrokes within a given text box.

This article assumes that you are familiar with Visual Basic for Applications and with creating Microsoft Access applications using the programming tools provided with Microsoft Access. For more information about Visual Basic for Applications, please refer to your version of the "Building Applications with Microsoft Access" manual.

NOTE: Visual Basic for Applications is called Access Basic in Microsoft Access version 2.0. For more information about Access Basic, please refer to the "Building Applications" manual.

MORE INFORMATION

When a user presses CTRL+ENTER from within a bound text box on a form, a Windows shortcut results. The result is sent directly to the operating system and cannot be suppressed by Microsoft Access or any other program running under Windows.

To intercept the carriage return/line feed effect of these keystrokes, you can insert the following event procedure on the KeyDown event of the text box:

   Sub Text1_KeyDown (keycode As Integer, shift As Integer)
      Dim shiftdown As Variant
      shiftdown = (shift And ctrl_mask)
      If shiftdown And (keycode = 13) Then SendKeys "{BS}"
   End Sub

REFERENCES

For more information about using KeyCode = 0 to ignore keystrokes, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   ARTICLE-ID: Q120827
   TITLE     : ACC2: Setting KeyCode=0 for KeyDown Does Not Ignore
               All Keys

Keywords          : kbusage FmsHowTo
Version           : 2.0 7.0 97
Platform          : WINDOWS
Hardware          : x86
Issue type        : kbhowto