Populate a Multi-column Combobox with a 2D array on Access - arrays

Question

I tried to follow this method:
ComboBox1.ColumnCount = 2
Dim Films(1 To 5, 1 To 2) As String
Dim i As Integer, j As Integer
Films(1, 1) = "Lord of the Rings"
Films(2, 1) = "Speed"
Films(3, 1) = "Star Wars"
Films(4, 1) = "The Godfather"
Films(5, 1) = "Pulp Fiction"
Films(1, 2) = "Adventure"
Films(2, 2) = "Action"
Films(3, 2) = "Sci-Fi"
Films(4, 2) = "Crime"
Films(5, 2) = "Drama"
ComboBox1.List = Films
source
But the .List property does not work on Access. Any ideas ?

Answer 1

As June7 said, use the ComboBox.AddItem() method in a loop. For your purposes, the ComboBox must not be bound to a data source: It's Row Source Type property should be set to "Value List". To add a multi-column string to a ComboBox row, use a semicolon to delimit the the columns. For example:
ComboBox1.AddItem (Films(1, 1) & ";" & Films(1, 2))
or
Dim rowStr As String
rowStr = Films(1, 1) & ";" & Films(1, 2)
ComboBox1.AddItem (rowStr)
AddItem() automatically appends the row to the end of the ComboBox's list, if you do not specify a row index parameter. For more info, see ComboBox.AddItem method at Office Dev Center.
Screenshot: VBA Demonstration Image

Answer 2

A "Form" in Access is not the same kind of element/object as a "UserForm" is in Excel where your "source" link points to (https://www.excel-easy.com/vba/examples/multicolumn-combo-box.html).
In Access it would be a good idea to get the information into your Combo Box (or List Box) from either a table or a query. You can of course code it with VBA, but then you might find yourself adding/editing a hole lot of VBA here and there, as in Access it all goes more naturally by using SQL and the database engine.
This is a larger topic, but basically you should probably have different tables for "Films" and for "Categories"
Table1:
Table2:
Then you should define the relationships since most likely there are different amount of films in your database than there are categories. Saying that we would like to avoid a situation that you would have to add another movie, let's say "Die hard" into your movie list. That would probably fall into the category "Action". In the database we do not want to repeat ourselves. Just we will, by ID, refer to categoryID by it's value.
So, having done that you need to create a form in Access. Create maybe a query that will get the values for you:
After this you can define the source for the combo e.g. by using wizard:
So this way you can maintain each of the lists separately in their own tables.
Here is the query that got created:
On the Data tab you can decide which bound column to use relative to datasource.
On the Format tab you can adjust the widths of the columns in your combobox. Use 0 length to hide a column.
This way no VBA code is needed.
If needed it is also possible to create or edit the queries with VBA but that is another story.
Hope this helps.