Publishing to Word

Despite Access's powerful reporting capabilities, you won't want to use it like a word processor. You might find that you occasionally need more formatting options than Access offers. When this happens, consider publishing your Access report (or data) to Word. By publishing , we simply mean copying the data and the existing format to a Word document.

During the publishing process, you'll probably lose some of the Access formats, but you'll likely be reformatting the data anyway. Now, let's publish the CatalogsAndPlants report to Word by doing the following:

1. In Access, click the Reports shortcut in the Database window and select CatalogsAndPlants.

2. Select Publish It with Microsoft Office Word from the OfficeLinks button on the Database toolbar. Figure 16.9 shows the report in Word.

   Figure 16.9. Access copies the selected Access report to a Word document.

   

After you have the data in Word, you can use all of Word's formatting capabilities. However, the published document doesn't start out as a Word file. Access publishes the data to a rich text file document. When you save the file, change the Save As Type setting to Word Document ( *.doc ). Otherwise, Word will save the file as an .rtf document.