Alternating line colour in a report

Wouldn't it be nice to make your report a bit more readable, perhaps by alternating the background colour of each row? If nothing else, this can save your users having to get a ruler out to read across the lines of your report. But how to do it? Well, there are a couple of things to cover first. We're going to be modifying the Detail section of the report, since I'm assuming that's where you've got your “row” fields. Take a look at the properties of the Detail section and, chances are, you'll find the Back Color property is set to 16777215 - this is white! Consider a colour as being made up of red, green and blue - each of these parameters takes a value between 0 and 255 in the world of Access colour, and the overall colour value is determined like this:

Red value
+ (256 * Green value)
+ (256 * 256 * Blue value)

Red, green and blue all have values of 255 for the colour white - doing the maths reveals the equivalent colour property value to be 255 + (256 * 255) + (256 * 256 * 255) = 16777215 - I know, how intuitive...

So what value do you use for your alternating colour? Well, the easiest way to work this out is to use the Back Color property's builder and pick a colour from a dialog box, then make a note of the number. You'll be pleased to know that pale grey (the alternate colour of choice for all discerning developers) equates to 12632256 - I'll be using this in the example below.

The other thing to point out is that for this to work effectively you must ensure that all visible controls in your Detail section have their Back Style property set to Transparent, otherwise you'll end up with unwanted white blocks all over your nicely shaded background. Anyway, here's the code to do the alternating - it uses the Xor operator within the Detail section's On Format event to do bitwise comparison between the two row colours, and sets the background accordingly.

Private Sub Detail_Format(Cancel As Integer, FormatCount As Integer)
    Const lngColour = 4144959 'i.e. 16777215 (white) - 126322566 (pale grey)
    Detail.BackColor = Detail.BackColor Xor lngColour
End Sub