The radio buttons that appear at the bottom of the Part Layout dialog when a Part and Problem are selected
in the Document Tree
Acces documents store their content in 3 levels: Document, Part, and Problem. A Document contains one or more Parts, and Parts can contain either one or more sub-Parts, or one or more Problems.
Document-specific layout options (such as page margins and document templates) work in a straight-forward manner. They affect the entire Document and cannot be set for a specific Part or Problem. These layout options can be set using the first section of the Format Menu.
Part- and Problem-level layout options work a little differently and require a bit more background information to understand.
The dialog pages brought up by the second section of the Format Menu belong to the Part Layout Dialog. This dialog lets you modify layout options for Parts and the Problems they contain. It also lets you apply the settings to the entire Document, or just the currently-selected Part or Problem.
When the dialog is brought up while a Problem is selected in the Document Tree, options that do not apply to Problems will be disabled. If you plan on making document-wide changes, these settings will be re-enabled when you select the "Apply settings to entire document" radio button at the bottom of the dialog.
When working with the Part Layout Dialog to modify settings for a Part, the settings you change will apply to ALL of the Part's sub-Parts or the Problems it contains. The settings will also apply to any new Problems or sub-Parts added to that Part. These settings are said to be inherited by the Part's children. You can use inheritance to quickly change the layout options for all the Problems within a Part.
Example
Let's say you have a three-part multiple-choice test, with 10 problems in each
part. You'd like all the questions in Part 2 to have their multiple-choice answers listed vertically. One way
to achieve this is to right-click all the problems in Part 2 and individually
set their multiple choice layouts. The faster, and recommended alternative method is to
right-click Part 2, choose in the shortcut menu, then use the
Format dialog to set Part 2's multiple choice layout to vertical. Doing this will cause all the problems in
Part 2 to inherit the vertical layout, all with only one visit to the Part Layout Dialog.
The important things to remember about setting Part and Problem-level options are: