Access 2010 Custom Themes

Today’s guest writer is Steve Greenberg.

The recent Access 2010 Theme’s post introduced you to the new Office themes inside Access. Now let’s show you some of the advanced things you can do with themes. The controls we are about to use can all be found to the left of the Design tab once you’re designing a form or report in design or layout view.

In addition to using the out-of-the-box themes, you can also create your own themes. On the Design tab, choose Fonts | Create New Theme Fonts or Colors | Create New Theme Colors. Here’s the dialog for creating your own theme colors.

Once you’ve created your own theme colors, you’ll want to save them for future use. Choose Themes | Save Current Theme. The theme gets saved as a .thmx file to a folder inside your Application Data folder. On my computer, that folder is

C:\Users\stevegr\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes

Any .thmx files that are located in this folder are available in Access. This means you can share themes with colleagues or even deploy a set of suggested corporate themes via group policy.

For more information about themes, please see this Office Online help article: Apply, customize and save a document theme in Word or Excel Although the content was written for Excel and Word 2007, it applies to Access 2010 theming.

Advanced options for applying themes

By default, if you select a theme in the theme gallery, it applies to all forms and reports in your application and to new forms and reports you create. If you want to only apply the theme to one object or to all the objects with themes that currently match the selected object, use the right-click menu on the theme.

What about Access 2007 AutoFormats?

Although databases built with AutoFormatting will look the same in Access 2010, the AutoFormat feature is not included in Access 2010. Themes have a number of advantages over AutoFormats

• AutoFormats applied to individual objects. To change the look of your entire database, you had to open each object and apply the AutoFormat.
• AutoFormats were not customizable. All you got were the 25 we shipped in the box.
• It wasn’t possible to isolate particular controls from the strong arm of AutoFormat. Let’s say you wanted a particular control’s border to be bright red because it’s extremely important. If you applied an auto-format, that control’s border would change. If you run into this situation in Access 2010, just set the control’s border color to a Standard color from the color-picker. You can change the theme without affecting the control’s border.

What about the Access Theme Colors from Access 2007?

We admit that our choice of terminology here is a bit confusing. The Access 2007 “Access Theme Colors” were designed to make it easy to create an application that blends in with either Windows or with Office. These colors are still fully-supported in Access 2010. They’re just not visible in the color-picker. You’ll have to drop-down the list of available colors to see them.

We hope you enjoyed this post on theming. I’m eager to hear your comments. We’ll continue shortly with some posts about the new controls in Access 2010 forms.