In the Real WorldThe Ephemeral Paperless Office

In the Real World The Ephemeral Paperless Office

Business magazines of the 1980s and early 1990s touted the forthcoming "paperless office." Articles envisioned scanning incoming documents, storing the images in disk files, and handling all document processing on PC workstations. Document imaging and storage system vendors introduced a wide range of expensive hardware to support the paperless office concept. A new breed of consultants arrived on the scene to develop the workflow systems required to integrate document-processing hardware with existing business processes. Document imaging, workflow, and portal-based collaboration systems have become a multi-billion dollar industry.

Automotive and other large firms developed electronic document interchange (EDI) to process orders, invoices, and payments electronically. Email became a top contender to eliminate ever-growing piles of interoffice memos. Now large and small organizations alike are replacing complex EDI systems and their high-cost private (called value-added) networks with XML documents, XML Schema Definition (XSD) language, XSLT transformations, and the Internet.

XML-based business-to-business (B2B) communication was one of the hot topics of the late 1990's dot-net boom. Despite the subsequent decline of stock market valuation of firms at the bleeding edge of the erstwhile business-to-consumer (B2C) revolution, B2B transactions with standards-based XML Web services promise to replace B2C e-commerce as a major source of revenue for an army of software vendors and consultants. Much of Microsoft's .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET marketing effort is directed to early adopters of XML Web services. Office 2003 isn't immune to Web services propaganda, as demonstrated by Chapter 31, "Creating and Consuming XML Web Services."

Paperless office is an oxymoron the most popular PC peripheral component continues to be the printer. Sales of printer paper continue to grow at better than 10% per year, and the market for copiers and fax machines shows no signs of a significant slowdown. According to Hewlett-Packard, 90% of information in 1997 was stored on paper and 10% was in digital format; by 2004, HP estimates that paper-based storage will drop to 30%, with digital files holding 70%. The total amount of stored information doubles every four years or so. Thus, HP projects a continuing increase in the demand for printers and paper, and printers continue to deliver HP's highest margins.

Beginning with version 1.0, one of Access's strongest selling points has been its versatile, integrated report-printing capabilities. The report event model lets you write VBA code to customize report generation. Most other database front-end development platforms have add-on report generators, such as Crystal Decisions' Crystal Reports. Visual Basic 6.0's Report Designer, which replaces prior versions' Crystal Reports add-on, doesn't even come close to offering the rich feature set of Access 2003 reports. Visual Studio .NET 1.0 lacks an integrated report designer and relies on a "Lite" add-on version of Crystal Reports.

As this chapter demonstrates, designing and implementing informative, attractive reports can be a tedious process. Exact alignment and proper formatting of labels, text boxes, lines, and other report controls is far more important to reports than forms. Spending the time needed to make reports concise and graphically appealing is worthwhile, especially when you consider that paper reports most likely are destined for management. Cubicle operatives now fulfill most of their information needs electronically.

There have been surprisingly few changes to Access's report printing engine over the years, and Access 2003 incorporates no new report design features. (Microsoft released Report Snapshots, one of the subjects of the next chapter, as an add-in for Access 97.) Access 2002 delivered the capability to export live and static reports in XML format for Web distribution. Chapter 23, "Exporting and Importing Data with XML," covers XML Web reports in detail.