Chapter 13: Reports

Overview

As stated at the beginning of Chapter 12, the topics of forms and reports have many similarities. You can dynamically attach recordsets, have subforms and subreports, and even use certain controls that assist with the display of data. For many people, the report is the only part of Access that they see. For many companies, major decisions are made based upon the accuracy and quality of the reports.

As you will learn, you can create reports both manually and within VBA. However, Access has powerful report-writing capabilities, and, as you will also learn, harnessing that power can save you a tremendous amount of time when coding and debugging. For that reason, as we did with forms, we will focus on this capability. Then we will look at how to incorporate the finished report within VBA.

We’ll begin our discussion by developing an understanding of a report’s anatomy and then move into the programmatic issues of reports.