Microsoft Access 2010 Bible

Chapter 9: Presenting Data with Access Reports

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TABLE 9.1

Text Control Values for Can Grow and Can Shrink

Property Value Description

Can Grow Yes If the data in a record uses more lines than the control is defined to display,

the control resizes to accommodate additional lines.

Can Grow No If the data in a record uses more lines than the control is defined to display,

the control does not resize. Rather, it truncates the data in the control.

Can Shrink Yes If the data in a record uses fewer lines than the control is defined to display,

the control resizes to eliminate blank space. The Can Shrink property of all

controls in the section must be set to Yes before the section can shrink.

Can Shrink No If the data in a record uses fewer lines than the control is defined to display,

the control does not resize to eliminate blank space.

To change the Can Grow settings for a text control, follow these steps:

1. Select the Features text-box control.


2. Display the Property window.


3. Click the Can Grow property, click the arrow, and select Yes.

Note
The Can Grow and Can Shrink properties are also available for report sections. Use a section’s Property
Sheet to modify these values. Setting a report section’s Can Grow and Can Shrink affects only the section,
not the controls contained within the section. However, you must set the section’s Can Grow to Yes to allow
the control within the section to grow. If the section’s Can Grow is not set, the control can only expand as far
as the section’s border permits.

The report is starting to look good, but you may want to see groups of like data together and deter-

mine specific orders of data. To do this, you use sorting and grouping.

Sorting and grouping data

You can often make the data on the report more useful to users by grouping the data in informa-

tive ways. Suppose that you want to list your products first by category and then by description

within each category. To do this, you use the Category and Description fields to group and sort the

data.

Creating a group header or footer

Grouping on a field in the report’s data adds two new sections — Group Header and Group

Footer — to the report. In the following steps, you use the group header to display the name of the

product category above each group of records. You won’t use the Category group footer in this

example because there are no totals by category or other reasons to use a group footer.