Highlight the Current Control in an Access Form...Without VBA!

Colin Riddington (a.k.a., IslaDogs) posted a clever technique for highlighting the active text box or combo box on a Microsoft Access form without using any code whatsoever:

The technique takes advantage of a bit of a quirk in Access text boxes and combo boxes.  Even when these controls have a "Transparent" Back Style, the background color becomes visible when the control has the focus.

The idea, then, is to set the background color for your text boxes and combo boxes to a highlight color while setting the background style to transparent.  This will hide the highlight color when the control does not have the focus, but display it when the control does.

• Back Color: #FFF200
• Back Style: Transparent

Here's what this looks like in action:

Dealing with Non-White Backgrounds

One downside of this approach is that it doesn't work as well if you use a different background color for your forms than for your text and combo boxes.

For example, here's the same form from above if we set the background color to green:

One solution to this problem is to place identically sized rectangles directly behind the text boxes and set them to your preferred text box back color, such as white (#FFFFFF).  

Here's what that technique looks like in action:

Sizing and Aligning the Rectangles

Manually sizing and aligning the rectangles would be a tedious, error-prone process.

Instead, I highly recommend taking advantage of some legacy shortcut keys to streamline the process of aligning and resizing the rectangles:

Before we get to that, though, let's start by setting some default properties of the rectangle control on our form:

1. Select the Rectangle control tool to change its default properties
2. Set "Special Effect" to Flat
3. Set "Border Style" to Transparent
4. Set "Back Color" to #FFFFFF
5. Set "Width" to 0.1"
6. Set "Height" to 0.1"

With these defaults, we can click inside of our existing text boxes to create a small square rectangle that we can reliably reposition and resize.  Here are the step-by-step instructions:

1. Select the Rectangle control tool
2. Left-click inside the text/combo box to place a small square
3. [Shift] + [Left-click] on the text/combo box to create a multi-control selection with both the rectangle and text/combo box
4. [Alt] + [O], [A], [L]: align left
5. [Alt] + [O], [A], [T]: align top
6. [Alt] + [O], [S], [W]: resize to widest
7. [Alt] + [O], [S], [T]: resize to tallest
8. [Shift] + [Left-click]: deselect rectangle control (text/combo remains selected)
9. [Alt] + [O], [R]: bring to front

Here's a screen recording of what this looks like: