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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-08T23:13:06+00:00

This question is mainly for curiosity, but also, in the description, I had intended

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This question is mainly for curiosity, but also, in the description, I had intended to highlight an infrequently documented behavior of Access.

Background

When creating an Access report, we can use the On Format method of the detail section to modify values or properties per-record. For example, assume we want to hide a field label when the value is empty:

Private Sub Detail_Format(Cancel As Integer, FormatCount As Integer)
    If (IsNull(Me.SomeField) Or Me.SomeField = "") Then
        Me.SomeFieldLabel.Visible = False
    Else
        Me.SomeFieldLabel.Visible = True
    End If
End Sub

What I did not realize about this until today is that the assignment .Visible = False does not modify the instance of the label in the Detail section, but rather is modifying the definition of the label on the report.

This can be demonstrated with the following modifiction to the code:

Private Sub Detail_Format(Cancel As Integer, FormatCount As Integer)
    If (IsNull(Me.SomeField) Or Me.SomeField = "") Then
        Me.SomeFieldLabel.Visible = False
    End If
End Sub

Assuming the label is initially visible (in form Designer), the event produces somewhat unexpected behavior: the label will remain visible until the first empty record; after that, it will remain hidden for all other records – I had originally expected that at each call of Detail_Format the controls where starting with their default definitions.

Question

Is there any way to reference the particular instance of a control within the Detail_Format event?

In this simple case of visible true/false, this is easily handled by just a simple if-then-else, but I can imagine more advanced scenarios where one might want to leave the default values in tact.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I don’t believe so, in all of my experience, properties of report objects always apply universally across the report, not to specific instances of the abject (if the object is repeated).

    For your example, I would use a text box instead of a label to label the field, and use something like =IIf(IsNull(Field1), "", "Label:") for the controlsource. That way it won’t show anything if the field is null, yet still show the label text if there is a value.

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