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Alternate row colors on reports with Microsoft Access

There may be times when you would like to format alternate row colours when creating a Microsoft Access report. This can greatly aid the user who is viewing the report, by ensuring that the data is in a much more visible format.

To enable you to create this, all that is required is that the following code is added to the reports Detail On_Format Event Procedure:

Private m_RowCount As Long


Private Sub Detail_Format(Cancel As Integer, FormatCount As Integer)
m_RowCount = m_RowCount + 1
    If m_RowCount / 2 = CLng(m_RowCount / 2) Then
            Me.Detail.BackColor = 15263976 'Change value to the color you desire
        Else
            Me.Detail.BackColor = 14811135 'Change value to the color you desire
    End If
End Sub

The following shows an example of the above code in action in a Microsoft Access Report:

Microsoft Access report showing alternate row colours

This code sample should work in Microsoft Access 97, 2000, XP and 2003.

Check out Creating Alternate Row Colours in a Microsoft Access 2007 Report to see how we can do this using Microsoft Access 2007.