Disabled Controls Playing Up

[The Professor]

Hi All,

I've created a form and placed various fields (textboxes) on it, along with their associated labels, by default all controls are enabled and unlocked and all controls have identical formatting. When certain criteria are met, VBA code (which treats all the controls in question, exactly the same) will disable some fields (and by default their associated labels) which is fine, except for one thing - the appearance of some of the now disabled labels. Some disabled labels take on a 'flat gray' appearance, whilst other disabled labels adopt an 'etched' appearance. The mixture of the two very different appearances is extremely off-putting to say the least. I cannot for the life in me figure out what is wrong and why I have some disabled labels with an 'etched' appearance, and other disbaled lables with a 'flat grey' appearance - I want them all to adopt the 'etched' look when disabled. The textboxes themselves are fine, no problem there, it's only their accosiated labels that are adopting the two differfent appearances when disabled. I have been wrestling with this issue for nearly two weeks now and have got exactly nowhere, it's driving me to distraction and I'm beginning to think its nothing I'm doing wrong.



The font used with the controsl is Calibri (detail). But I've tried several other fonts with exactly the same result.
I'm using Access 2010 64bit on Windows 7 Prof. Can anyone - please - shed some light on this very odd behaviour?

Thanks in advance.

[June7]

Are you sure the SpecialEffect property of the labels are all set to Etched?

[The Professor]

Hello June7,

This is an interesting point you raise, and many thanks for your reply.

The labels for all the controls in question have their SpecialEffect property set to 'flat' - both those that take on an etched appearance when disabled, and those that don't, because 'Flat' is the look I want when the controls are enabled, which they will be most of the time. If I set them to 'etched' then their normal appearance when enabled has a square boarder around it, which I don't want, hence I chose the 'Flat' effect, I only want the etched appearance when disabled. However, even though all the lables are set to 'Flat', some of them adopt the etched appearance when disabled, but others don't. It's this difference in behaviour that I'm trying to get to the bottom of.

[June7]

No luck replicating this issue. Unless you want to provide db for analysis, probably can't help. Follow instructions at bottom of my post.

[The Professor]

Hello June7, following your last post, I decided to play around for a while with the SpecialEffect format setting, and I tried again with the 'etched' setting as default for the controls when the form opens - I wanted to see if I could have the etched effect without the square boundary around the label, but alas I wan't able to find a way to to this, so I eventually set all the controls back again to the 'flat' setting. However, the surprising side effect of this was to solve the problem I was having (described earlier) when the controls were disabled. Now for some reason, all the control labels now adopt the 'etched' look when disabled - and none, thankfully take on the wretched flat-gray appearance. Although the problem appears to have been solved, there are no settings (as far as I can tell) that are actually different now, than before, but nevertheless, the issue seems to have rectified itself. So thank you very much indeed for your help - I'm very grateful indeed to have finally got past this issue.