Shawn Donley’s BLOG

Recently I was asked to create a little project that would present colorized data based on certain values.  The data was results from testing were if a student received 400+ they passed the test, but less than 400 they failed the test.  The following is how I accomplished this with Access2007:

1. I had to get the data in access.  It came as a .CSV file so it was easy to import the data as a table.
2. Next, I had to weed through the data to get the fields I needed.  Mainly it was the studen’t name, and their scores from each test.  I did this by creating a query on the main data table.  (Note:  in the future, I can reuse this database just by changing the data in the main table)
3. Once I had the query, I created a report on the query.  This is were I was able to colorize the data.
4. In the report design view, on the Design Ribbon, there is an option AFTER YOU SELECT A FIELD that is called Conditional.  It has an Icon that looked like this:



5. This little utility is what created the magic.  I was able to add conditions to the field so that when a certain value was presented, then the color of the font would change.  Therefore, the report would show green text for those with a score of 400 and above, and red text for those with under 400.
6. It even disregarded those fields that did not contain numeric data which was nice as well.

The following is an example of how to configure the condition:

No get confused by the font color.  When you change the color it changes the font color slector for all of the conditions.  To end this little tutorial… this one was a life saver.