Access™ 2007 VBA Programmer's Reference

M.1. Visual Interface Standards

No matter how good your application is under the covers, people won't believe it if it doesn't look good. On the other hand, if your application looks great, people may believe it is great. While a user's perception of your Access application might not be fair, you are going to have to deal with it. Luckily, it isn't too hard to make your application look as great on the outside as you made it inside.

M.1.1. Use Businesslike Colors

Don't use a lot of colors on your Access forms. If you want your applications to look like they fit right into the Windows environment, use the venerable Windows Standard color scheme, meaning gray. You should actually make the colors of your forms adapt to the Windows scheme automatically.

For the background color of almost everything (forms, buttons, read-only text boxes, and so on), use the Windows default Background Form color. The numeric color value is −2147483633. Use white for the background of changeable fields. In Access 2007, you can now see the names of the Windows colors in the drop-down list instead of their numbers.

Magic numbers: Access color properties use regular, positive numbers for normal static colors. All the "Windows" colors (that change automatically when the Windows scheme changes) are negative numbers.

To test your colors and make sure they aren't hard-coded to a certain color, change your Windows color scheme to something completely different and look through your screens to make sure all ...