NeoPa - right, it's not desirable to have the users always save the update. And I too was surprised that it works differently. My hunch is that it has something to do with Access 2007's enhanced datasheet properties (such as allowing users to add a totals row, etc) - i'll bet that the Format property is "special" when the form is in datasheet view, and thus by changing it, Access is thinking this must be a "major change" to...

I believe that the Form_Load event is the one you'll want to use - the Form_Open event is the first event that fires - before the form is even populated with data. Thus, attempting to move to a new record when you have yet to bind the form to the data is probably what is giving you the error.

My rule of thumb: setup routines (including dynamically setting the RecordSource) for the form can get called from Form_Open, but anything dealing...

just a quick follow up-

I realized I didn't explicitly say this in the detail, but the prompt to save changes only occurs in Access 2007; I'm running Access 2007 SP2.

A little more testing reveals that this happens on ANY form (whether it is a subform or not) that has the default view of Datasheet. So, setting the format property of a textbox (or other control) programmaticall y when the default form view is Datasheet...

Hi - I've got an interesting one here:
I've got an mdb file that some users run in Access 2003 and some in 2007.
I have a Localize function that is called on the open of each form to set the captions and formatting to match the user's locale. One thing that I commonly do is set the Format property of text boxes that display date/time values to match the user's date/time preferences (i.e. m/d/yy or d/m/yy). It is not always an option...