Richard,

First of all I enjoyed your Work Order Seminar. It was extensive, yet easy to follow. I appreciated the details when required as well as the "shameless" referrals to your other course materials - it was very helpful to allow drilling into the details beyond the scope of this seminar.

Now to my question and perhaps you have answered this before:

In general, when we generate a report and have multiple items in a list within a report, how do we group the items in groups of five, ten, or x items just to make the list more readable?

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Reply from Richard Rost:

In Access 2007 they added an "Alternative Back Color" property for reports which will allow you to specify a "banding" color for every other record. This makes reports (especially large ones) much easier to read.

In previous versions, you had to do this with VBA code. Something like:


Private Sub Detail_Format(Cancel As Integer, FormatCount As Integer)

If Me.Detail.BackColor = 16777215 Then
    Me.Detail.BackColor = 12582910 ' light blue
Else
    Me.Detail.BackColor = 16777215 ' white
End If

End Sub


Just put that in the build event for the DETAIL section (right-click on it and select Build Event) and that should do the trick. With a little extra code and some counters, you could program it to highlight every 3rd or 4th row instead.