Creating a More Attractive DataGridView

Question

My form looks like this with a DataGridView:

http://sites.google.com/site/shadchanproject/Home/Untitled.jpg?attredirects=0

I would like to make it look more professional. Can someone recommend a "makeover" for it? Perhaps there is a more attractive way to display this data.

Answer 1

This looks quite nice already. What you might want to do is set the Dock to Fill with the Properties panel to make it fill the whole form.

Answer 2

Matt Berseth has a lot of articles on this:

http://mattberseth.com/blog/gridview/

Answer 3

Hi there, I have been using a free grid control from Component Factory, it has all the same features as the standard DataGridView. The grid allows customization for pretty much all UI elements.

Answer 4

My first thoughts are on the column colors, does the color mean something, if you are try to differentiate to columns I would use two subtle colors. Large color shifts should have a meaning (Errors are bold and Red). The Font should use the System font styles and basic colors should also you the system colors. Colors and font styles may work for you but not everyone, some people are color blind, some people need larger fonts.

Answer 5

Personally, I'd recommend softening those colors a bit. Use pastel-versions of the same color perhaps.

Also, like person-b suggests: Dock->Fill.

I'm not a big fan of unnecessary row/record-selector columns. If you don't need it, I'd recommend getting rid of it.

One last thing, Normally I'd recommend not paining your UI with a crayon, instead letting the colors default to whatever the user has specified as their Windows theme. However, I see the point of coloring the columns in your case. I would suggest that you allow the user to modify the colors. I'm not color-blind, but it's possible your colors may be unreadable to someone who is.