When designing forms and reports in Microsoft Access, there's an option to change the color of various objects. When you select a color using the color dialog, it is translated into a seven-digit numeric code. This code is a mystery to me. It bears no apparent relationship to the RGB of the color selected, and it's not a hex code, eitherthe standard ways to define or select colors in most applications. In designing Web pages and various other documents using other applications, I typically use a standard set of colors for which I have memorized the hex color code. I'd love to be able simply to enter that code in the color fields in Access. What is the relationship between the color codes used in Access and those standard codes, and is there a way to use those standard codes in place of Microsoft's codes?
Mark J. Lacore
When you understand the hexadecimal color numbers, you can tell at a glance roughly what an unfamiliar one will represent. The three pairs of hex digits represent the the red, green, and blue components of the color respectively. For example, FF0088 would have lots of red, no green, and a moderate amount of bluea sort of magenta. In Access the order is the reverse of web-based colors, with blue first and red last, so this code would be 8800FF. And yes, people who work with them a lot tend to remember the codes for their favorite colors.
Fortunately, this expertise can still be useful in Access. In the Field Properties dialog, you simply add "&H" as a prefix to the color code, for example, &H8800FF. As soon as you enter this value, Access displays it as a decimal number, in this case 8913151. If you need to go the other way, from decimal to hexadecimal, you can use the Windows Calculator. Launch it and select Scientific from the View menu. Type the number in or copy/paste it, and then click the Hex option button.