Recently, there was a thread on UtterAccess that I thought might be helpful to more people. The poster radish asks:

I'd like to change the color of a control then be able to change it back to its original color. If I wanted to use the theme's highlight color, e.g., how would I do that in code? It's listed in the property sheet as "Highlight". Sure, I could grab the values of that color but is it possible to reference "Highlight", "Access Theme 5" or "Dark Blue 3" in vba code?

Access 2007 has a series of generic colors that change color based on the Office theme color. Internally, we store negative numbers and map those to predefined colors in the theme color table.

You can get the underlying value using the immediate window. Something like:

?forms("colors").Controls("Text16").backcolor

In case you are lazy like me—here is a table of the color values you need to use in VBA to have it theme with the Office theme color.

Color VBA Color Value
Alternate Row -2147483610
Background Form -2147483613
Background Light Header -2147483612
Borders/Gridlines -2147483609
Text Black -2147483617
Text description -2147483614
Text Light -2147483616
Text Dark -2147483615
Highlight -2147483608

Here is a link where you can get similar color values for system colors.