Microsoft Access 2010 Bible

709

CHAPTER

Advanced Access

Report Techniques

IN THIS CHAPTER

Organizing reports to present

the data in a logical manner

Producing more attractive

reports

Providing additional

information about the report

Learning other approaches to

enhance your presentation

B

ack in the bad old days, most computer-generated reports were
printed on pulpy, green-bar paper in strict tabular (row-and-column)
format. The user was expected to further process the data to suit his
particular needs — often, a time-consuming process that involved manually
summarizing or graphing the data.

Things have changed. Visually oriented businesspeople want useful, infor-
mative reports produced directly from their databases. No one wants to
spend time graphing data printed in simple tabular format anymore. Today,
users want the software to do much of the work for them. This means that
reporting tools such as Microsoft Access must be able to produce the high-
quality, highly readable reports that users demand.

Because Access is a Windows application, you have all the super-duper
Windows facilities at your disposal: TrueType fonts, graphics, and a graphi-
cal interface for report design and preview. In addition, Access reports fea-
ture properties and an event model (although with fewer events than you
saw on forms) for customizing report behavior. You can use the Visual Basic
language to add refinement and automation to the reports you build in
Access.

In this chapter, I provide some general principles and design techniques to
keep in mind as you build Access reports. These principles will help make
your reports more readable and informative.

Cross-Reference
This chapter does not discuss the basic process of building Access reports (see
Chapter 9 for those details). Instead, this chapter describes a number of design
techniques you can apply to Access reports using the skills described in
Chapter 9.