Microsoft Access Team Blog : Style

Access 2010 Custom Themes

Clint Covington — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:46:00 GMT

Today’s guest writer is Steve Greenberg.

The recent Access 2010 Theme’s post introduced you to the new Office themes inside Access. Now let’s show you some of the advanced things you can do with themes. The controls we are about to use can all be found to the left of the Design tab once you’re designing a form or report in design or layout view.

In addition to using the out-of-the-box themes, you can also create your own themes. On the Design tab, choose Fonts | Create New Theme Fonts or Colors | Create New Theme Colors. Here’s the dialog for creating your own theme colors.

Once you’ve created your own theme colors, you’ll want to save them for future use. Choose Themes | Save Current Theme. The theme gets saved as a .thmx file to a folder inside your Application Data folder. On my computer, that folder is

C:\Users\stevegr\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes

Any .thmx files that are located in this folder are available in Access. This means you can share themes with colleagues or even deploy a set of suggested corporate themes via group policy.

For more information about themes, please see this Office Online help article: Apply, customize and save a document theme in Word or Excel Although the content was written for Excel and Word 2007, it applies to Access 2010 theming.

Advanced options for applying themes

By default, if you select a theme in the theme gallery, it applies to all forms and reports in your application and to new forms and reports you create. If you want to only apply the theme to one object or to all the objects with themes that currently match the selected object, use the right-click menu on the theme.

What about Access 2007 AutoFormats?

Although databases built with AutoFormatting will look the same in Access 2010, the AutoFormat feature is not included in Access 2010. Themes have a number of advantages over AutoFormats

AutoFormats applied to individual objects. To change the look of your entire database, you had to open each object and apply the AutoFormat.
AutoFormats were not customizable. All you got were the 25 we shipped in the box.
It wasn’t possible to isolate particular controls from the strong arm of AutoFormat. Let’s say you wanted a particular control’s border to be bright red because it’s extremely important. If you applied an auto-format, that control’s border would change. If you run into this situation in Access 2010, just set the control’s border color to a Standard color from the color-picker. You can change the theme without affecting the control’s border.

What about the Access Theme Colors from Access 2007?

We admit that our choice of terminology here is a bit confusing. The Access 2007 “Access Theme Colors” were designed to make it easy to create an application that blends in with either Windows or with Office. These colors are still fully-supported in Access 2010. They’re just not visible in the color-picker. You’ll have to drop-down the list of available colors to see them.

We hope you enjoyed this post on theming. I’m eager to hear your comments. We’ll continue shortly with some posts about the new controls in Access 2010 forms.

Access 2010 Themes

Clint Covington — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:35:34 GMT

Today’s guest writers are Steve Greenberg and Viki Selca. The PMs that have lead the effort to make it easier to create great looking apps.

People say “Don’t judge a book by its cover” but everyone who develops software knows that applications are judged by their look and feel every day, and for good reason. It’s critical to keep the user interface clean so that end users of the application can get their work done without fuss. If you depend on Access as a key part of your business, the difference between a good-looking and poor-looking application can be significant for your reputation and for your bottom line. At the end of the day, as hard as you work to perfect the schema of your application, it’s your forms and reports that leave indelible impressions on your users.

This blog posts kicks off a series about the key improvements to forms and reports that you’ll see in Access 2010. Our overall goal is to make it easier to make modern-looking applications that are visually-appealing, consistent and intuitive.

Our first stop is themes.

There are three primary challenges to creating a great looking app. First, picking a good groups of colors is a real challenge even for designers. Second, is picking the right set of fonts. Third, is updating all forms/reports and new objects with these choices. Access 2010 themes make this easy.

In earlier versions of Access, you might decide in advance which colors and fonts you want to use. However, this kind of upfront planning leaves you with little ability to change your mind. Next thing you know you’re leaving a stakeholder review trying to figure out how to batch convert all your light blues to shades of green. We’ve all been there.

Access 2010 integrates with Office Document Themes. To explain themes, it’s helpful to start with a quick peak at the 2010 color-picker:

If you choose from the Theme Colors section, you’ll notice that the color’s value in the property sheet is not an RGB value. Instead, it will look something like “Accent 4”. This is a token that’s filled in by the theme. The complete list of colors is:

Background 1, Background 2, Text 1, Text 2, Accent 1 through Accent 6, Hyperlink, Followed Hyperlink

You may also notice that the color is followed by a Lighter or Darker modifier, represented as a percent. As you might expect, these allow you to lighten or darken the core theme color. In the Themes section of the color picker, each column contains a set of five variations on the theme color.

Use theme colors and rest assured that you’ll have colors that complement each other nicely. Moreover, it’s simple to experiment with other colors in the future. Just open a form or report in design view, go to the Design ribbon and drop down the Theme picker.

Here are some examples of the same form shown with different themes.

As you can see it’s easy to change the whole look of the application with one click. Access 2010 ships with 40 themes. These themes are used in every Office application, so your Access databases can easily match your Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Word documents.

Color Support in Access 2007

Zac Woodall — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 21:50:00 GMT

This is the next installment in a series of posts about Access 2007 originally made by one of our developers on the Access team on his own blog that I'm moving here for the broader audience to enjoy.

"I find color schemes that I just like and that just feel right" - Alan Bean

Figure 1: Access 2007 Color Picker

In Access 2007, we have changed the color picker control from that old 80s looking control to a 21st century color picker. This new color picker is now consistent across all of Access, and is the same one that you will see everywhere in Office 2007. As a small note, this color picker has meaningful tooltips (not color numbers, but say 'Dark Green'), which makes accessible users out there very happy.

And yes, this means that you can now (finally!) use more than 16 colors in your datasheets. You can pick any colors you want for gridlines, background and alternate background (new 2007 feature).

You can see the new color picker in Figure 1.

You probably noticed the 'Access Theme Colors' section. Office 2007 has three themes: Silver, Blue, and Black. Access developers can develop solutions that look good in all themes by using the new set of Access Theme Colors. Alongside the colors available in Access 2003 (including the system colors, we'll talk about that in a minute), we have made available a group of colors that will change depending on which theme you are. We have 20 colors in the theme set.

The first 10 colors are colors that we use everywhere: border, background, alternate row background, selection, font color, etc. This set allows you to theme your forms and reports to match what we actually use in datasheets and everywhere in the product - so you will look as if it's an out-of-the-box Microsoft Access solution.

The second set of 10 colors is a gradient from light to dark. This set allows you to theme using variation on the same tone ("ton sur ton" like my mother likes to say). This is very effective in producing stylish, polished and professional looking reports and forms.

Given Access's supports of Windows System colors, this begs the question as to when developers should just use those vs. these Access theme colors. The answer is that when you'll want to chose whether your app themes with the Windows or the Office theme (e.g. your user has Green for Windows while Office is in blue). In Access 2007 I don't recommend using system colors because then your forms and reports will not be the same color as the ribbon, the task panes, the nav pane, the status bar, and the other Office UI. That said, they still work as well as they did in Access 2003 if you reaaaaaally want to use them.

An additional benefit that I haven't mentioned yet is that all of these Access Theme colors have accessibility support in them. If any of your customers uses high contrast, these colors will adapt to it and always show correctly. So not only are you able to build solutions that look good in the Office Themes, but ones that look correctly for all your customers that require accessibility support (government contracts anyone?).

Figure 2: HTML Style RGB and System Colors

As an added bonus, we are also changing the property sheet to make all of this more helpful. First, the color properties (border color, font color, background color, etc) are now combo boxes instead of text boxes. So when you actually select one of the Access Theme Colors in the color picker, we will show "Background (white)" or something like that instead of a bogus long number. Even further, we also list all the system colors in this combo box - so you will never ever need to use that unintuitive negative number format to get system colors in the property sheet (side note: as not to break your solutions out there, the OM is unchanged).

As the last coupe-de-gra - and I think this is awesome even although most people just shrug when they hear this - the colors are now shown as HTML colors. That means that all custom colors in the property sheet will be shown as "#FF0000" instead of 255. To make it extra-nice, we allow you to type in HTML colors and old Access numeric values (you can use this as an old timer trick to impress new Access 2007 users). No more conversion tables to find the colors you like.

You can see the new system color support and HTML style RGB colors in Figure 2.

Updated AutoFormats and New UI

Erik Rucker — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:58:00 GMT

Access 2007 has significantly updated the AutoFormats included in the box, and we'll provide a tool that can help create your own formats or customize the existing ones. This provides a fast way to generate a good (and modern) looking set of formatting across all your applications. Access, along with the other Office applications, has supported AutoFormat for some time, but the formats themselves are looking a little stale. Access 2007 addresses that. In this post, I'll cover the built-in AutoFormats and how to customize them with the UI. In the next post I'll describe the tool and how to use it to built your own formats and customize the gallery below.

AutoFormat Tools

The ribbon makes it much easier to surface controls for things like AutoFormats. Where before we'd have to throw a dialog to show the formats, in Access 2007 we can simply show a "gallery":

The gallery control in the ribbon shows 4 formats in a row at 1280*1024, and provides controls for scrolling through the other rows of formats. In addition, there's a "More" button that expands the gallery into an in-place pop-up that shows all the formats present and is both scrollable and resize-able to accommodate custom formats.:

The Built-in Formats

The default format is the "Office 2007" format and is the one you get if you use the Quick Create tools to build a new form. In the examples, I'm showing a simple quick-created form. Note that the form is in Layout View, so the dotted line and yellow highlighting around the ID field below won't appear at runtime. The example below is the default quick-created form. Below that is each of the other built-in AutoFormats in name order. A couple of the formats have interesting stuff that is right-aligned, so I've linked an expanded version as well. Finally,

Default:

Access 2003:

Apex:

Aspect:

Civic:

Concourse:

Currency:

Deluxe:

Equity:

Flow:

Foundry:

Median:

Metro:

None:

Northwind:

Office:

Opulent:

Oriel:

(Click image to enlarge)

Origin:

Solstice:

(Click image to enlarge)

Technic:

Trek:

Urban:

Verve:

(Click image to enlarge)

Windows Vista:

Customizing AutoFormats Through UI

Access 12 provide a similar AutoFormat wizard to that in 2003 that lets users customize the look of the formats or push changes back to them. The wizard is launched from the bottom of the gallery and provide both a list of the formats with preview, and some customization controls.

Clicking the Options button expands the dialog to allow control over which parts of the form or report get formatted:

Clicking Customize presents another dialog that allows the user to save changes back up to the format:

You can choose to either save the changes to a new AutoFormat or update the existing one (if it isn't one of the built-in formats). If you create a new format, it will be available from the AutoFormat wizard dialog, but not from the collection on the ribbon. However, we have created a tool that will let you update the contents of the gallery to present your own formats. I'll cover that tool and how to build your own formats in the next post.

Better Looking Forms & Reports, Faster

Erik Rucker — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 16:53:00 GMT

Building modern looking data forms & reports in Access 2003 can be difficult. Doing the heavy lifting is easy - there are great tools for building the data-bound portions of the form - but making the interface look great can be a challenge and can require some creative hacks. UtterAccess even has a popular board devoted to helping people build better looking interfaces. In Access 12, we've built a number of features that will help people build great looking apps with far less code, time and effort.

Better Image Support

We did work to improve native support for image formats. In the past, you could add pictures but there were some serious limitations. First, when the picture was added it was converted from its native format to a device independent bitmap (dib). This resulted in significant bloat if the image stored data in a compressed file format such as gif and jpg. Even worse in many cases, when the image was converted transparency was lost.

Access 2007 now supports BMP, GIF, JPEG, Exif, PNG, TIFF and DiB without bloating the database size. Images with transparency work great. You can see how we're using transparency below - the buttons are all transparent, as is the image in the title bar.

To ensure that database are backwards compatible, we created a new database property called “Preserve image format.” This property controls if the image is converted to a dib or stored in its native format. ACCDB databases default to storing images in their native format while MDB and ADP database Access 2007 will continue to convert images to DiBs so that the image is available when the form is used by older versions of Access. In a nutshell—if you want your image to be displayed in previous versions of Access make sure preserve image format is set to false. I recommend turning off the property if your app is deployed as a runtime or in an Access 2007 only environment.

Another painful limitation of former versions was displaying images on a form or report that were stored in the file system. The Northwind employees form had 135 lines of code to make this work. Now the image control can be bound to a UNC path including jpg and png files.

AutoFormats

AutoFormats are a great way to create a consistent look across an application, but the existing themes were looking pretty dated. In Access 12, there are 25 new themes that you can choose from that will add that final polished look to your application. The Quick Format gallery gives a small preview of the font and color schemes:

Other New Look Improvements

In Access 11 the SizeMode property provides enums for Clip, Stretch, and Zoom. These properties do not allow us to create really small horizontal or vertical images that tile across the header. The 2003 behavior was to stretch the image across the entire form or report. In many cases the right effect is to stretch horizontally. There are now two new enums: Stretch Horizontal and Stretch Vertical. This makes it possible to stretch an image across the header of the form when it is the Picture property on the background of a form or report.

We also did work to make the grid control more modern and remove the Windows 95 3-D look. Internally, we draw the grid colors from the exact same color palette as Excel.

A few weeks Deano asked about tab controls:

“Also will tab controls blend correctly when you change the colours? I use Access 2000 and there's a section in the top-right of the tab control that does not match the changed form colour.”

I’m pleased to say that the color now matches the form color. Here is a screen shot from WinXP:

We made a one change to buttons that I think folks will find useful. There is a new enum for backstyle called Transparent and a new property called HandOnHover. Using those two properties and you can create buttons that look like hyperlinks. BTW – have you seen the Vista buttons? I think they look great in our shell.

Cyrus asked about pixel drawing problems on disabled images. This problem has been fixed in builds after beta 2 if preserve image format = false. We remove all the color from the image.

There is still a some button work we want to consider in the next version. Cyrus—we hear you on button background colors and images and text. Another thing we wanted to do this version but didn’t get to was color properties for different mouse over states.

New Attachment Data Type

If you want to store images directly in the database—the attachment data-type and control works great. In the past users would use the OLE Object data type. Because of how OLE worked there were bloat issues as it had to store a preview of the file along with the OLE data. Attachments are a new complex data-type that stores multiple attachments to a record in a binary field in a hidden table. We compress the file when it is added if it isn’t already a compressed file type. Here is the dialog to manage attachments:

When the image has focus there is a helpful floating toolbar that allows you to navigate through records and launch the dialog.

There are three display as enums: Paperclip, Image, and Icon. The icon will always show up as a paper clip in datasheet view.

Attachments are exposed in QBE similar to other complex data forms. Users can query for the collection or the expanded version returning a row for each attachment. Let me walk through an example with a simple issues database with one record that has 4 attachments. The query designer exposes three columns that are stored in the hidden complex data table: FileData, FileName, and FileType. Double clicking on the root Attachment node will add the attachment collection to the grid below.

This generates the following SQL:

SELECT Issues.Title, Issues.Attachments

FROM Issues;

The query returns the collection of Attachments.

If you add the Attachment.FileName to the query you get the expanded results set. Here is the SQL:

SELECT Issues.Title, Issues.Attachments.FileName

FROM Issues;

The datasheet now returns the expanded results:

The collection is exposed through DAO so that you can modify and update it. Here is a short code sample:

Private Sub cmdAddImage_Click()

Dim rsEmployees As DAO.Recordset2

Dim rsPictures As DAO.Recordset2

Set db = CurrentDb

' Get the parent recordset

Set rsEmployees = Me.Recordset

'Put the parent record into edit mode

rsEmployees.Edit

'Get the attachment recordset

Set rsPictures = rsEmployees.Fields("AttachmentCell").Value

'Set first attachment to loaded picture

rsPictures.Edit

rsPictures.Fields("FileData").LoadFromFile ("C:\FileName.jpg")

rsPictures.Update

MsgBox "Picture added"

' Update the parent record

rsEmployees.Update

End Sub

The attachment data-type is available in ACCDB files and link tables to WSS lists. It is not available for MDB and ADP databases. We didn’t expand the 2GB limit for Access databases. If you think you will have lots of data in your app break out the attachment column into its own database and use a link table to join it with the table.

Next Time

In the next big post, I'll look at Filtering and Grouping. In the meantime, I'll have a smaller post about searching in the navigation pane.

WYSIWYG Report Authoring

Erik Rucker — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 14:57:00 GMT

Access 12 has a variety of tools designed to make it both quicker and easier to author applications. The WYSIWYG report authoring view tools fit both bills. We saw a bit of them in the posts on Customizing the Issues Template and Starting from Scratch and can finally dive in deeper into the features this time. A knowledgeable Access developer will not be able to create reports that are significantly different than he could in Access 2003, but he'll be able to build those reports more quickly and without using VBA, ensuring that the reports look the same in a locked down environment as one with VBA turned on. New Access users will be able to author great looking reports for the first time.

What You See Is What You Get...

The core of the feature is as simple as 'you can look at your data while you're authoring the report'. This makes it much easier to visualize the report while you're authoring it, and eliminates switching views to gauge things like whether the data all fits or not. The quickest way to start a new report is to use the Quick Create button, which creates a new simple report with all the fields in the underlying table or query. In this case, I'll select a query from the nav pane and create a simple report (of course I could start from scratch as well - the only difference is that with Quick Creates I get all the columns and delete the ones I don't want, and starting from blank I add the ones I do want).

(Click image to enlarge)

Quick Create builds a flat report, with all the fields in the query, presented in the same order as the query:

(Click image to enlarge)

Since the report has all the available columns, the most likely thing I'll need to do first is to remove some. This is as simple as clicking and deleting (either with the Delete key or from the context menu).

(Click image to enlarge)

The next thing that I need to so is resize the columns to fit my data. This simple task presented 2 challenges in the old design view. First the other columns had no awareness of the fact that I was changing the width of their neighbor and so didn't get out of the way. I had to resize my column, then had to move all the other controls out of the way to make space for it. This wasn't hard, but was annoying and took time to get everything just right. The second issue was that I couldn't see the data while I was sizing the columns, so it is hard to tell exactly what the report will look like. In Access 12, I simply resize the thing in layout view and I'm done - I can see the data, and the other columns adjust as necessary.

Reordering columns is similarly easy. I simply select the column I want to move and drag it back and forth to drop in another location. Again the other columns resize as necessary.

(Click image to enlarge)

Grouping and Filtering

Grouping is as easy as right clicking and selecting "Group on ...". For more complex grouping, there is a new modeless grouping dialog that docks at the bottom of the screen and provides all the flexibility you'd expect.

Adding totals to reports is now very simple, and available on the ribbon. You simply select the column you'd like to total and click on the Totals button. For numeric data types, there are a variety of math functions available. In this case I've selected the text field for Issue, so can insert a count of Issues.

(Click image to enlarge)

This makes it easy to show how many issues there are for each person in the group.

To filter the data, all I need to do is select the data I'd like to filter for and right-click. In this case I've clicked on a text column in a row with the value "Active". Access then proposes a set of text filters for Active. Had a selected a number, I'd get appropriate filters for that; for a date I'd get date-aware filters (e.g. this week, last month, etc.).

(Click image to enlarge)

Changing the Presentation

Now that I've got the data I'd like to see, in the right order, I can start adjusting the formatting of the report so that people can understand it more easily. First, I'll add gridlines to separate the data rows by clicking on the "Gridlines" control on the ribbon:

(Click image to enlarge)

By selecting "Bottom", I get lines underneath each of the rows:

(Click image to enlarge)

My report is quite wide still, and will not print on regular paper in portrait orientation (this is easy to see from the dotted lines in the image below). It is simple for me to switch to landscape orientation from the ribbon as well, by going to the Page Setup contextual tab

(Click image to enlarge)

Now the dotted lines showing the page borders contain all the text, and I can easily see that my report will print one page wide.

(Click image to enlarge)

When I flipped to landscape mode, Access just changed the paper orientation and didn't move any controls, so as you can see in the image above, the date and time stamps are no longer right-aligned in the header, and I need to move them. I can do this in layout view as well, and simply click and drag them just as I would in the design view.

The ribbon provides controls for setting Control Margins (the internal spacing around the text inside the control):

And Control Padding (the spacing around the control itself). For this report, I've left the margins at the default "narrow" setting, but have increased padding to make the report a little easier to read:

(Click image to enlarge)

To make it even easier to parse the report, we can use alternating row colors to create a "green-bar" style report (I think I just dated myself).

The alternating row color tools are on the Formatting ribbon, and use the new color controls discussed in the last post.

(Click image to enlarge)

Finally, it is easy to add conditional formatting to a report, to ensure that the reader's eye is drawn to the right records. The user selects the Conditional formatting button on the ribbon, and sets up the formatting in a dialog.

(Click image to enlarge)

In the dialog, the user defines the condition, and selects what formatting to apply. In this case we'll mark old dates in red.

(Click image to enlarge)

The end result:

Starting From Blank

In the example above, we started from a "Quick Created" report, but we could have just as easily started from scratch. If we'd started from a blank report, we'd use the "Add Existing Fields" taskpane to drag the fields we want to add onto the report rather than deleting the ones we don't want. All the other functionality works just the same. Of course I can use "Add Existing" from a Quick Created report as well, either to build a join (this is shown in the Start from Scratch post, and we'll cover in more depth later) or to simply add back a field I've deleted. In this case, we'll add back the Comments field:

(Click image to enlarge)

I open the taskpane from the ribbon and then drag the field I want to the report - its new location is shown by the I-beam cursor.

(Click image to enlarge)

And the column is inserted (and of course the others are moved over to make space).

Design View

The existing Access design view is still present, and is still super useful for many tasks. We think the new layout view is faster for most common tasks (and much easier for new users), but we fully expect experienced Access users to switch back and forth between Layout and Design views frequently when authoring reports, and have worked hard to make that switch quick and seamless. Here's the report we've been building in the traditional Design View.

(Click image to enlarge)

Next Week

I'll be out next week at the Access Advisor conference. We'll have 5 folks from the Access team there showing Access 12 and teaching tips & tricks in depth. If you're attending, I look forward to meeting you there! My plan is to create a post next week about the new Layout View authoring tools for forms, and will hopefully be able to do that from Vegas.

Color Support in Access 12

Erik Rucker — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 14:25:00 GMT

This is a quick post that isn't on the overall list but that is provides some more details about new color tools in Access 12. This was written by Clint Covington on the Access PM team (thanks Clint!). The post on the new forms design tools is still to come.

Colors in Access 12

Office 12 introduces a new theme model for the ribbon and shell chrome. The blue Luna and dark obsidian themes draw from different color palettes. Access 12 introduces a new set of form and report colors that make it possible to build applications that look great in both themes. Our goal is to allow users to build great looking apps that fit the current theme. We are still tweaking the colors but the following images should give you a good idea. These are the same forms just running in the different theme.

(Click to enlarge)

Color Pickers

The colors can be set by using the Access theme color picker that is available from the ribbon and builds on color properties in the property sheet.

The first and second row include Access theme colors that change based on if the app is running in the blue or obsidian theme. These colors have been designed to theme appropriately in high contrast mode.
The first row in the Standard Colors section includes a generic color palette used by the rest of Office.
The bottom row of colors is the generic standard colors.

These colors and system colors are available in the property sheet as named colors.

You will also notice that the property sheet now displays the colors in the standard HEX format format.

We also updated the datasheet to support more than 16 colors. This makes it possible to create much better looking dark backgrounds with light fonts.

Backwards Compatibility with New Colors

If we store a new negative number as a property value as a color value, when the color is displayed in Access 2003 it will display as black. This effectively breaks cross version compatibility for any new form created in Access 2007. When the user is using an MDB the Access Theme Colors section in the color picker and Access theme colors in the property sheet dropdown will not be visible to the user. Any color sets will store the positive version of the number and not the mapping color number. This means that new controls, property sheet changes, and autoformats will always persist colors that work in previous versions of Access.

Users need to Save As ACCDB to take advantage of the new theme colors. If a user attempts to save an ACCDB as an MDB we will not attempt to fix-up the colors.

Microsoft Access Team Blog : Style

Access 2010 Custom Themes

Access 2010 Themes

Color Support in Access 2007

Updated AutoFormats and New UI

AutoFormat Tools

The Built-in Formats

Customizing AutoFormats Through UI

Better Looking Forms &amp; Reports, Faster

Better Image Support

AutoFormats

Other New Look Improvements

New Attachment Data Type

Next Time

WYSIWYG Report Authoring

What You See Is What You Get...

Grouping and Filtering

Changing the Presentation

Starting From Blank

Design View

Next Week

Color Support in Access 12

Colors in Access 12

Color Pickers

Backwards Compatibility with New Colors

Better Looking Forms & Reports, Faster