Access 2016 sizable form borders too narrow under Windows 10

Question

I don't know if this is a general problem with Office 2016, or if it is specific to Windows 10 users, but I find that sizable MDI forms in Access 2016 have a single-pixel border that is very hard to grab with the mouse.

The form borders show as a single-pixel red line, and have no difference in appearance regardless of the mode of the form, whether the mode is "no border", "dialog", "sizable" or "thin". The border appears the same in design mode, as in the example below.

I've tried this on a couple of different computers running Office 2016 under Windows 10, and the problem is the same, so it's not a driver issue. I've opened the database under Office 2010 and Windows 7 and the borders come up at the normal size for Windows 7. I haven't tried Office 2016 under Windows 7 though.

I have to assume that the problem is related to the way that form borders are handled in Windows 10, where the drop-shadow forms part of the draggable area.

Is there any way around this?

Gundry

Yikes. :( I will soon get a test system with Windows 10 and Office 2010 and will report back how it looks there. I hope this can be changed if the culprit is Windows 10. – Seafarer

It is Windows 10. I'm running Access 2016 on Windows 7 and Windows 10, and only Windows 10 has the problem. Also, the problem is only with the left, right and bottom borders. – Kentiga

Makes me wonder if the developers of Office haven't upgraded to Windows 10 yet! – Gundry

I just noticed that I never reported back. With Access 2010 under Windows 10, the window borders are normal (phew!). imgur.com/zaC0Kwh – Seafarer

Microsoft have confirmed that this is a problem and they are working on a fix. They reported it as "DONE!" the other week, but have now marked it as "UNDER REVIEW" as they realized they had only fixed part of the problem. Essentially, tables in the QBE window are now OK, but form/query/table borders are still the same. access.uservoice.com/forums/319956-access-desktop/suggestions/… – Gundry

Answer 1

Yes and it's a P.I.T.A. The 2 workarounds I've been using are, 1. 'slide' the mouse along the border you want while vigilantly watching for the curser to change and then go mouse button click. 2. use TAB to cycle through the graphic object then right-click to operate on it (align, size, position).

Scrannel

Your suggestion helped me out. I use Alt+Space, s. Then move my cursor anywhere near the windows edge and press and drag and the window resizes. IMPORTANT NOTE: You must first resize to make the window larger and then it you can it smaller. – Merit

Answer 2

This tip I have found on the Internet and tried it.

I used playing around with the 2 values BorderWidth and PaddedBorderWidth found with Regedit in the key HKEY_CURRENT_YSER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics. After setting BorderWidth to -50 and PaddedBorderWidth to 0. The result was that the borders remained approximately 1 pixel wide, but once you selected it, they are shown wider.

Still no solution for the fore mentioned primary question though.

Jacquijacquie