    REPLACING THE COLOR PALETTE IN MSACCESS
    ***************************************

The enclosed UTILCOL.MDA is a copy of the MSACESS Utility.mda that has been altered to included a new color palette with more colors.  If you have the original UTILITY.MDA installed on your system you can just substitue this for that one. To do that you must edit the MSACESS.INI file which should be in your windows directory.  Open the file with Notepad and go down to the options section which list the UtilityDB. Put a semi-colon at the begining of that line to "comment out" and add a new line so that it looks similar to the following:

[Options]
SystemDB=C:\ACCESS\SYSTEM.MDA
;UtilityDB=C:\ACCESS\UTILITY.MDA
UtilityDB=C:\ACCESS\UTILCOL.MDA

If you have added other things you might have additional listings.  Save the MSACCESS.INI file with the changes and restart Access.  When you click the Palette button you will get the enlarged Palette which works excatly like the original.
 
If you have another file being used as UtilityDB, such as Helen Feddema's NEWUTILS.MDA, it is possible to add the new Palette to it but it will require more steps.  First edit the MSACCESS.INI file to "comment out" (;) the line loading the current utility and put back the original UTILITY.MDA.  Copy UTILCOL.MDA to your Access directory.  Then load Access and on the file menu click open.  Change the *.mdb listing to *.mda.  Load the file that you had been using to add the Palette.  Click on Forms and then go to the Palette form and delete it.  Next import the Palette form from the UTILCOL.MDA.  To do this you click on File menu-import.  Then specify that it is Access format and the *.mda extension and then the UTILCOL.MDA. Select the Palette form and import it.  Close the database you are altering and reverse the procedure.  Alter the MSACCSS.INI file to "comment out" UTILITY.MDA and remove the (;) from the line of the database you want to use.  Restart Access and when in Form Design view you will have the new Palette.

I am working on a descripton of the steps it took to alter the Palette and I will upload it as a text file the Lib. #15 as FIXCOL.TXT when it is completed which may take several days.  

Suggestions for improvements and feed back appreciated.


4/27/93              Richard Laughinghouse    71563, 3035

