Windows 7 Download Add color formatting to columns

Today's guest blogger is Pavlo Pedan of ARGO Business Corp. He has 15 years of experience with Access and has a great site of tips  at As we all know, a List Box control has a Fore Color property. It sets the fore color for column values and headers simultaneously. Also,Office 2007 Professional, we know that table and query fields have a Format property, where color formatting can be set. For example, you can format a number field as 0.00[Green]. As stated in Access 97, 2003 and 2007 help, "If you set a field's Format property in table Design view, Microsoft Access uses that format to display data in datasheets. It also applies the field's Format property to new controls on forms and reports." So when creating a new Text Box control, the Text Box inherits the underlying field's Format property. However, List Boxes and Combo Boxes can also inherit this color formatting. And, it works for existing controls as well as new ones. You can change the Format property for a table field, and the new color will be inherited by an existing control (Text Box, List Box, or Combo Box). The strange thing is,Windows 7 Download, the List Box control has no Format property, and the Format property for the Combo Box control is not changed by the Format property of the underlying field. See a sample database here for some examples. Using color formatting for list boxes and combo boxes definitely makes an application more attractive. One can set different columns into different colors,Office Professional 2007, set different colors for header and items,Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, and use a type of conditional formatting for empty values. For example, the Format property for Field2 in the picture above is: [Blue];@;"Empty"[Magenta]. This formatting overrides the Fore Color property of the control. Such formatting is applicable not only for underlying tables, but for queries as well. Therefore, by choosing different queries for different List Boxes, we can have different sets of colors while referencing the same table. However, some limitations apply. The above only seems to work for Access 97 and 2007 (and 2010?) but not for 2003. Also, it seems to work only for Text and Memo fields. Have you experimented with this? If so, please post a comment,Microsoft Office Professional 2010! Thank you,
Pavlo Send your Power Tips to Mike and Chris at accpower@microsoft.com. <div