Question

I have an Access form in my application displayed always in continuous form mode. It consists of a line of text controls and drop down list box controls and there is conditional formatting on each one.

I have several such forms in my application. Most of them behave quite normally, in that the backgrounds of all the controls remain white, even when the record is not selected, and conditional formatting works on all of the rows even when the record is not selected.

I have one such form that behaves differently. Whenever the record is not the selected one, all the control background go (I presume transparent) and the conditional formatting is lost. However there is one field on the record where that is not true – it remains correct throughout.

I can’t find any different between any of the properties that causes this behaviour.

Some important information.
1) This is running on Access 2000
2) Running on Access 2010 it performs normally – there is no changing of rows when they are selected
3) I edited the conditional formatting in Access 2010 (although since then, I have gone back to Access 2000 and deleted a complete control and reloaded it from scratch).

So my question is – what else is there that causes this behaviour. My users are complaining, but I don’t know how to correct the situation

Answer 1

I found the answer to this question.

This one form was using the expression

NZ([outcome],"ATT") <> "ATT"

if I change that to

[outcome] is not null or [outcome] <> "ATT"

the problem goes away. It appears that the complexity of the formatting expression is the issue.

The reason why one field in the form did not become susceptible to this problem and remained correct is that it did not use this expression, but a different one that was fairly simple.