Microsoft Access 2010 Bible

Chapter 20: Advanced Access Report Techniques

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You might want to add other special characters to the control. For a complete display of the char-

acters available in the font you’ve chosen for the text-box control, run Charmap.exe, the

Windows Character Map application (see Figure 20.20). Be sure to select the font you’ve chosen

for the text-box control. The only constraint on the characters you use on an Access report is that

the font used in the text boxes on the report must contain the specified characters. Not all

Windows TrueType character sets include all the special characters, like bullets.

FIGURE 20.20

Charmap is a useful tool for exploring Windows font sets.

Charmap is quite easy to use. Select a font from the drop-down list at the top of the dialog box,

and the main area fills with the font’s default character set. Some character sets are incredibly large.

For example, the Arial Unicode MS font includes more than 53,000 different characters, including

traditional and simplified Chinese, Japanese Kanji, and Korean Hangul character sets.

Every character in a Windows font is accessible through the Chr() function. The page footer of

rptBullets includes a text box filled with characters specified by the Chr() function. For

example, the smiley face character is specified with Chr(74). Some of the characters displayed by

Charmap are identified only by their hexidecimal values. If the decimal value is not given, the hex-

idecimal value can be used with Chr() by using the CInt() function to convert the hex value to

integer: Chr(CInt(“&H00A9”)) displays the familiar copyright symbol (©) when used to set

the contents of a control set to the Arial font.

Adding emphasis at runtime

You might add a number of hidden controls to your reports to reduce the amount of clutter and

unnecessary information. You can hide and show controls based on the value of another control.

You hide a control, of course, by setting its Visible property to False (or No) at design time.