While holding down SHIFT, left click on each of the controls.ģ. Right click Asset Details and select Design View.Ģ. When you click on a field or use the TAB button the control you land on has the “focus.” We’ll change the way focus looks for the Asset Details form.ġ. Format Focused Controlsįor our last example we’ll change the way a control that has focus looks. You can see two of our items have been highlighted based on the contents of a different field (Figure 5). Repeat the process for the “(5) Poor” condition (Figure 4). Select the appropriate formatting and click OK to return to the rules manager.ħ. In the expression field we need to compare the Condition field to the values we’re seeking – “(4) Bad” in this case. Click the first field under “Format only cells where the:” and select “Expression Is.”ĥ. Right click the Item field and select Conditional Formatting.Ĥ. As we did previously, we’ll highlight the Item field.Ģ. We’ll color the field Orange if “Bad” and Red if “Poor.”ġ. Formatting Based on Data within a Different Controlįor this example we’ll highlight the Item field if the condition field is either Poor or Bad. Click OK again.Īs you can see in Figure 3 our rule is applied and items less than $100 are highlighted. Note that you will see a preview of what the formatting will look like (Figure 2).ħ.

For this example we’ll just use a red highlight. Next, we need to select our formatting options. The middle field should say “less than” and the third field will be “100.”Ħ. Next we’ll build an expression to determine when we highlight certain values. For the rule type select the first open to check values in the current record.ĥ. The Conditional Formatting rules manager will open. Right click on Current Value and select Conditional Formatting.ģ. This will select all rows under the Current Value heading.Ģ. In this case we’ll click the Current Value heading.

If the value is under $100 we’ll highlight the value in red.ġ. Formatting Based on Data within the Controlįor our first example we’ll highlight values in the “Current Value” field. Once I created the database I entered in some sample data (Figure 1). For the purposes of this article I created a new database based off the Desktop Asset Tracking template available within Access 2013. Let’s set up a sample database so we can dive into learning about conditional formatting.

Microsoft access 2013 tutorial video