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I’m a graphic designer/web-UI designer by trade but have some (albeit limited) knowledge of Access. I haven’t used it for a few years now but have been asked by a company to redesign the front end of their split database that was built using Access 2010. They had a programmer design the whole database, and it works well, but they do not like the actual appearance of the front-end so they have asked me to update it with some ‘modern design’ so-to-speak (i.e. stylise the buttons, fieds etc.)
I’m just wondering, what options do I have with this? Is there any way to use CSS as such to stylise the front-end? Or is there any built-in design tools that are useful? I plan to produce concepts using Photoshop to show them but it’s knowing the limitations of what can be done with Access in terms of the front-end design. Any help would be appreciated!
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Answers
Access is built to be GUI-intuitive. There’s no 3rd party tools to “pretty” it up, only to improve the functionality.
That being said, there’s plenty of stuff you can do to improve the look of it. Drop an Option Group down, delete the label, change the Special Effect to “Flat” and the Border Color to dark blue and you’ve got a nice little box to keep relevant controls grouped together. Utilize the Back Color of the form to give it a little more appeal; I always find a softer “slate” blue looks appealing and professional. White or soft yellow text looks nice on that background.
Add a label that stretches all the way across the top of the form. Make its background color a darker blue and center the text for a very appealing “header” for your form, or you can do the same thing inside those option groups I mentioned above.
Most coders I’ve ever worked with were pretty happy making dull gray forms with non-aligned textboxes and calling it a day. Take a little time to snazz it up with a few ideas I’ve given (and any you can make up yourself) and it goes a long way towards presenting an application that people don’t dread using.
It can be done, but it’s a major task because Access isn’t designed for developers (not to mention graphic designers) but for superusers. Thus, tools like you have in, say, Visual Studio, you can only dream of.
But if you are prepared to spend hours with alignment near pixel level, it can be done – as you may get an impression of from the screenshots here:
Modern/Metro style message box and input box for Microsoft Access 2013
Indeed, design of subforms is a challenge as these are offset a few pixels when embedded in the main form; if you are to accuracy to the pixel, this will hurt your eyes. Also, listboxes have a habit of shift their layout slightly when required – just to mention a few of the tasks you will encounter. In fact, once you have made some neat forms and controls, the only tool you have to ease your work, is to copy and paste these when you need a new form or control.
The icons are from the SyncFusion Metro libraray, colours are strict to the MS Metro/Modern palette, and fonts and proportions are as close to the Microsoft design guide as possible. This was chosen for two reasons: First, the design guide is so thorough and well thought out, and second, I had no reason to believe I could do it better. That may be different for you, of course.
The application was for a custom project, and users’ response was positive only, even from Mac users (using Remote Desktop) – they love the colours.
Here are few other UI components that “..are possible” without installation GitHubPage