Just a quick post to discuss colors in Access.

Colors can be an asset to designers, if used correctly, to greatly enhance your application(s), no doubt!

But how can we define colors is the question I thought I’d quickly touch upon today.

All too often I see in code people defining thing along the lines of

'Set the font color of a control
Me.ControlName.ForeColor = vbRed

where developer use one of the predefined ColorConstants, which include:

• vbBlack
• vbBlue
• vbCyan
• vbGreen
• vbMagenta
• vbRed
• vbWhite
• vbYellow

There are 2 major issues with the above (excluding the use of vbBlack and vbWhite): the choices are very limited and the colors are very aggressive (not colors I’d recommend to use as they are hard to look at, so not a good user experience).

So what are our options?

Luckily for use, as with almost everything Access (or VBA for that matter), we have other, better, approaches we can use for designating colors.

RBG

We can use the RGB function to specify the quantity of each color resulting in our final color.

Thus, we can implement it in code by doing something along the lines of

'Set the font color of a control
Me.ControlName.ForeColor = RGB(255, 0, 0) 'Red

Below are a few examples of color specifications using RGB:

• RGB(0, 0, 0) ‘Black
• RGB(0, 0, 255) ‘Blue
• RGB(0, 255, 255) ‘Cyan
• RGB(0, 255, 0) ‘Green
• RGB(255, 0, 255) ‘Magenta
• RGB(255, 0, 0) ‘Red
• RGB(255, 255, 255) ‘White
• RGB(255, 255, 0) ‘Yellow

What is nice with RGB is you can specify a much greater range of colors. Thus you are able to utilize much nicer color pallets that then built-in vb ColorConstants.

Web/HMTL/CSS/HEX Colors

The last approach I wanted to cover today was using web colors, HTML Hex color values. These have become such common place that, to me, this is the way to go when it comes to designating colors.

To designate a HEX color in VBA we simply do

'Set the font color of a control
Me.ControlName.ForeColor = Val("&H" & "FF0000") 'Red

Below are a few examples of color specifications using HEX:

• Val(“&H” & “000000”) ‘Black
• Val(“&H” & “0000FF”) ‘Blue
• Val(“&H” & “00FFFF”) ‘Cyan
• Val(“&H” & “00FF00”) ‘Green
• Val(“&H” & “FF00FF”) ‘Magenta
• Val(“&H” & “FF0000”) ‘Red
• Val(“&H” & “FFFFFF”) ‘White
• Val(“&H” & “FFFF00”) ‘Yellow

Do you notice any similarities between RGB and HEX colors yet?!

A great website regarding colors (HEX & RGB) is HTML Color Codes

Color Convertion Utility

Many moons ago, I created a simple little utility that you can use to find a color and its’ corresponding OLE, RGB and HEX values, refer to MS Access Sample – Colors Converter for the full article or simply use the button below to download your own copy (as usual, no strings attached!).

Disclaimer/Notes:

Microsoft Access 2010 Runtime
Microsoft Access 2013 Runtime
Microsoft Access 2016 Runtime
Microsoft 365 Access Runtime

I hope this help some of you out there understand some of the possible ways of working with colors in Access, and yes, there are still more ways, but that will be for another day. One way or another, RGB and HEX are the best and most versatile approaches to use.