First Published 9 July 2025

This issue was recently reported by Access developer Eric Blomquist (riktek) at Access World Forums

He observed that tab control page captions were shifted to the right when an ampersand was used as a shortcut key. With no shortcut key, the captions were centred correctly

Eric had originally observed this behaviour in very old versions of Access such as 2007 and raised the issue at Utter Access forum back in 2021.
He had now seen it happening in newer versions such as 2019 as well.

Initially, like several others, I was unable to replicate the issue.
However after some experimentation, I was also able to observe the effect using Access 365 by disabling the Use Theme property for the tab control.


As the screenshot shows, the captions are all shifted to the right – except for Up Down which has no shortcut key and is centred.
The other 3 page captions seem to be centred on the right half of the tab.

With Use Theme enabled, all the captions are correctly centred.


As explained in an earlier article on this website from 2023, The Curious Case of the Multi Row Tab Control, there are in fact two different tab controls used depending on whether the Use Theme property is enabled or not (as below).


This is purely a display issue related to the original tab control which did not have a theme property. It looks odd but does not affect functionality.
There is also an easy workaround: Set Use Theme = Yes.

In fact, if any change is made to the appearance of the old tab control, Access automatically sets Use Theme = Yes and changes to the 'new' version of the control.



Download:

Click to download the simple repro database used in this article:   Tab Control Caption Alignment     Approx 0.4 MB   (zipped)



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Colin Riddington           Mendip Data Systems                 Last Updated 9 July 2025

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