The KeyDown Event

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I want to hide the Pop-up Calendar on my Access form by pressing the Escape key

In the tutorial A Pop-up Calendar for your Access Forms I showed how you could use the ActiveX calendar control to add a pop-up calendar to a form. The calendar is placed on the form just like any other control but remains hidden until the user clicks a specific field, when the calendar becomes visible. Choosing a date from the calendar hides it again. But what if you didn't mean to open the calendar... how can you hide it without choosing a date?

Access forms and their controls can be programmed to respond to keyboard events. The KeyPress event is usually used to respond to normal characters such as letters or numbers. The KeyDown and KeyUp events are usually used to handle the "special" keys like Ctrl, Alt and Shift.

Let's program the form to respond to the Escape key by hiding the calendar:

There are two If Statements. The first checks to see if the calendar control is visible, and if it isn't the procedure finishes without doing anything. But if the calendar control is visible the second If Statement checks which key was pressed. If it was the Escape (ESC) key then two things happen. First, the focus gets transferred back to a control on the form (because we're about to hide a control and you can't hide a control that has the focus), then the calendar control is hidden and the procedure finishes.

There's another important thing you have to do to make this work. Set the Key Preview property of the form to Yes. You'll find it on the "Event" tab of the form's property sheet. This causes the form to "intercept" key presses before they are received by the form's active control and ensures that your chosen action gets priority.

I chose to use the Escape key in this instance, because it is what most users would expect. To see a list of the names and numerical values used to identify keys, ask Visual Basic Help about Keycode Constants.

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