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MS Access 2003: Open a Form from another Form (disabling the parent form until the child form is closed)

This MSAccess tutorial explains how to open a form from another form and disable the parent form until the child form is closed in Access 2003 (with step-by-step instructions).

Question: In Microsoft Access 2003/XP/2000/97, I have a form from which I open another form. The original form stays on screen in the background. How do I keep the original form disabled until I close the new form?

Answer: In Access, you can open a form in different modes. In this situation, you want to open the form as a dialog. A dialog disables the parent form (ie: original form) until the new form is closed.

The command that you want to use to open a form as a dialog is as follows:

DoCmd.OpenForm "Calendar", , , , , acDialog

In this example, we are opening a form called Calendar as a dialog.

The acDialog option on the OpenForm command specifies that the parent form (ie: the original form that opened the Calendar form) will not be accessible until the Calendar form is closed.