Part I: Access Building Blocks
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In Figure 9.36, you can see opportunities for improvements.FIGURE 9.36The report is pretty plain and uninteresting at this point.
Adjusting the page header
The page header contains several large labels positioned far apart from each other. The column
headers are small and just hanging there. They could be made one font size larger. The entire page
header should be separated from the Detail section by a horizontal line.If you wanted to add some color to your report, you could make the report name a different color.
Be careful not to use too many colors unless you have a specific theme in mind, though. Most seri-
ous business reports use one or two colors, and rarely more than three with the exception of
graphs and charts. Furthermore, colors are not much use when printed on most laser printers.
Color laser printers are just becoming widely available, so adding a lot of color to your Access
reports may not be appreciated by your users.Figure 9.37 shows these changes. The Product Display label has been changed to a blue back-
ground color with white foreground text. This is done by first selecting the control and then select-
ing Blue for the background. They’ve also been placed under each other and left aligned. The
rectangle around each of the controls was also properly sized by double-clicking each control’s siz-
ing handles.