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ASK NEIL
BLINKING LABELS IN ACCESS
QIn older versions of Access you could
set the text/field on a form to Blink,
but I cannot seem to find anything
on how to do it now in 2000 or 2003.
I’d like to draw attention to a field by
having it blink. Do you have any suggestions as
to how to do this?—Michael Mattingly
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To create a blinking
label in modern versions
of Access, you
need to write a snippet
of Visual Basic code.
118 PC MAGAZINE MAY 9, 2006
YYePG Proudly Presents, Thx for Support
Adds Code Builder
AYou may be thinking of much older versions
of Access, predating Windows. On a text-only
system it was possible to set an attribute that
would cause one or more characters to blink. That’s no
longer a possibility. If you want a blinking label, you
need to write a tiny bit of VBA code. Start by opening
the form in design view. Right-click the label that
should blink and choose Properties. Click the All tab
in the Properties dialog and change the label’s Name
property to blinkingLabel. Check to make sure that
the ForeColor property’s value is -2147483630, a code
representing the default window text color.
At the top of the Properties dialog, select Form in
the drop-down list: Now you’re editing the properties
for the form itself. Click the Event tab and scroll down
to the item titled Timer Interval. Here you’ll enter the
blink rate in milliseconds: 500 (one half-second) is a
good choice. Now comes that tiny bit of VBA code.
Click the box titled On Timer. A small ellipsis (…) button
will appear at the right; click it and choose Code
Builder. The lines “Private Sub Form_Timer()” and
“End Sub” will appear in the Microsoft Visual Basic
window. Between them add these lines:
With blinkingLabel
.ForeColor = (IIf(.ForeColor =
-2147483640, _-2147483633, -2147483640))
End With
Press Alt+Q to save and quit the VB editor, then
select View | Form View from the menu. Your label will
blink on and off, alternating between its original color
and the default background color for forms.
MORE ON XP’S FOLDER AMNESIA
QI ran across your article “A Solution
for Windows XP Folder Amnesia” (go
.pcmag.com/folderamnesia) and I think it
needs to be updated. The locations of BagMRU
and other subkeys have changed. The current
locations in Microsoft Windows XP SP2 are
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Win
dows\CurrentVersion\Shell and HKEY_CUR
RENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Cur
rentVersion\ShellNoRoam. The article does not
mention these locations; it omits the Current-
Version part of the locations.
I applied the fix successfully using a value
of 5,000 for BagMRU Size around the time you
wrote the article, and since then have had no
problems.—Geoff Walker
AAs explained in the earlier article, Windows
XP is supposed to remember your desired view
settings on a per-folder basis, but a glitch can
make it stop recording this information. The article
offered a Registry tweak that can sometimes cure this
problem. It spelled out changes in the Registry keys
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Win
dows\Shell and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\
Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam—specifically, it
recommended deleting subkeys named BagMRU and
Bags if they are present, and setting a larger number
for the value named BagMRU Size.
The keys were clearly found as described on our
test systems, and the Registry locations described
in the earlier article can be verified in the Microsoft
Knowledge Base article #812003 at support.microsoft
.com/kb/812003/EN-US. Yet this reader was just as
clearly successful using a different location. The main
difference seems to be that our test systems had all