Alternate Back Color not working properly

[kolarbr]

Hello all!

I have a simple problem but what seems to me a difficult solution. I have created a report in access and have selected a different "alternate back color" under the "Detail" section. I have used this function frequently and recently in other reports and it has worked fine.

For this report, however, it is not. The report does not highlight every other row like it should, instead, there are places in the report where it highlights every second, third, fourth row, etc. Has anybody ever seen this problem before? I will attach a screenshot if you do not understand completely what I am saying. From what I can tell, there is no pattern to which it is highlighting these rows. TIA!



Ben

[orange]

Here's a M$oft link for highlighting alternate report rows. It says acc2003 but may be relevant to your issue http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ac...001219146.aspx

[rpeare]

how are you setting up your conditional formatting?

Here is a super easy and foolproof (in my experience) way of setting up alternate line shading:

http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/f...minreport.html

[kolarbr]

orange and rpeare, thank you for your responses. However, I have already seen both of those links (I have done a lot of google and forum searching, trust me) and neither of those help. I'm not sure if you are aware, but the alternate back color in access '07 was put there to allow the user to have alternating row colors without having to use any code. To answer your question, rpeare, I don't have any conditional formatting other than setting the alternate back color to a light gray.

Thank you both for your replies. Anybody else have ideas or suggestions? I would rather not re-create the entire report, it was a lot of work.

[rpeare]

Well the reason your alternate fill is not working is that you have multiple lines for each item in your far left hand corner. It's not coloring the first item of each 'group' which is why you're ending up with double whites in some locations. that's why I suggested the data pig solution.

You don't have to do anything to your report other than set the background of your existing fields to transparent and add two fields, one is the line number count (which you can make invisible) and the second is the rectangle that you do the conditional formatting on.

Using the default alternate row settings I think you would have to have *one* line for each of your groups but I couldn't say for certain since I haven't tested it. The datapig solution will do what you want with minimal changes to your existing report and be able to do it exactly as it appears now with multiple rows per category.

[kolarbr]

rpeare, here is another screenshot I took of a different report I created in the same way. Notice that it has "groups" as well. I used the same method for highlighting alternate rows as I did for the problem report, without any trouble. I would prefer to stay away from having to write code or do the data pig thing, for simplicity's sake. There has got to be a setting somewhere that could fix this problem. Hopefully someone has had this problem before and knows an easy fix, rather than a workaround.

[kolarbr]

Problem solved...for reference in the future for anybody else that has this problem. When I went to design view I noticed that I had several headers that were all collapsed (b/c I didn't want the extra spaces), if you get rid of these entirely (turn the "Group & Sort" tab "on" -> at bottom of screen -> you will have "Sort by" and "Group by" -> click the "More" tab -> change "with a header section" to "without a header section") This will turn off unnecessary headers and will fix the problem.

Thanks for the help rpeare!

[rpeare]

Hah I was just going to post that the newest screen shot had header information which provides a separation so you don't see the double whites.