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Alternating row colors not working, at all

Anonymous
2017-02-03T20:01:11+00:00

Access 2016, Office 365, Windows 10.  Three different machines.

I've been through several searches and even tried to get help from Support. No dice.

Access is 'supposed' to default to this, but mine doesn't.  I want to have alternating row colors in a report.

In Design View, I select the "Detail" bar, and can selected an Alternate Row Color from Reprot Design Tools >> Format >> Alternate Row Color.  This seems to take, and when I check the Properties of the Detail area, both Back Color and Alternate Back Color are set appropriately.  If I go through themes, this also sets the properties correctly. 

The individual fields' Back Style has been set to Transparent, but as they don't 'cover' the whole row area, the Background color(s) for the row should be visible around them, if not behind them, anyway. 

I cannot figure out how to get alternating row colors in my reports.  Been trying in a couple different reports, a couple different databases, and installations on three different machines.  I can set the Back Color to anything I want, but it doesn't seem to want to 'implement' the Alternate Back Color/Alternate Row Color specification.

Any ideas? For the moment, I've dropped a rule (line) at the top of the Detail area that repeats every row as I expect, so right now I can get away with that for reading the report.  But I can't figure out why I can't get alternating row colors to work.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Access | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-02-07T16:50:16+00:00

    I had this very same problem just now. What it turned out to be was the Report Grouping.

    While in the Report Design Mode, left-click the ruler bar on the left side of the report and select Sorting and Grouping. If your Detail section falls under a field name's group, it could be causing the issue.

    I noticed that I could get the banding under the field name group, but not the Detail group. Luckily in my case the field name that I had it grouped under was arbitrary (I had it grouped by record ID, which is unnecessary since every record is technically grouped by this), so I was able to just delete that grouping and then my Detail section had banded rows again.

    Hope this helps.

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-02-15T20:00:05+00:00

    Try going to the report's query (under report details and then data) and then set ascending sorting on both needed fields. I believe it sorts in order of appearance in the query editor, so make sure you put Last Name left of First Name. Grouping shouldn't be required for the sorting you need.

    2 people found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2017-02-04T00:45:14+00:00

    Thanks. I saw that page, among many others.  As I said in my original question, I've attempted to manipulate the Alternate Back Color, and the other in-Report properties.

    I've been looking for instructions about manipulating VBA, but except for a very distastrous attempt years ago, I've never been able to use it.

    This is something that has controls inside the application, both in the menuing system and the properties.  It shouldn't be that hard to get working.

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-02-07T22:41:49+00:00

    Thanks for that. 

    Well, that's interesting. It seems the only way to get alternating row coloring is to only sort on one field at a time. So, okay, solves the problem, but makes the report kind of useless if I can't sort alphabetically by, say, LastName and FirstName at the same time.  Hmm. 

    Oh, and this is me again. It wouldn't let me log in, so I created a new ID.  Any further thoughts would be helpful.

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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  5. Anonymous
    2017-02-03T20:56:20+00:00

    See this info

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