Alternating Line Color Access Reports

Change Background Color of Report Lines

Do you remember the good old days when you got fan-fold computer printouts that had alternating color lines?  These banded report lines made it easier for your eyes to follow across wide detail lines. Here's a way for you to reproduce this alternating line color effect without having to buy the old fan-fold paper and you can choose any color - pastels only please.

Follow these steps: Create an 'On Print' event procedure in the Detail section of your report by clicking on the 'Detail' grey bar and viewing the properties sheet. In the VB code create a global variable just under the 'Option Compare Database' line.

In this example we use 'Dim gbl_shade As Boolean'. Create the event procedure code as show below.  This code will interrogate the gbl_shade variable and when it is True the report line background color gets changed (in this case the highlight color will be yellow-gold).  After the if statement the code switches the gbl_shade variable to the opposite boolean value.

Newly figured out simple method without all the complexity of the above alternating line color code:

Private Sub Detail_Format(Cancel As Integer, FormatCount As Integer)
If Me.Detail.BackColor = 16777215 Then
    Me.Detail.BackColor = 12582910
Else
    Me.Detail.BackColor = 16777215
End If
End Sub

Now, isn't the above code much simpler?