Planning Possible Reports

Planning Possible Reports

Planning your reports is similar to planning the forms. The difference between forms and reports, you'll recall, is that reports are meant to be printed out on paper, rather than worked with onscreen. You might have collected reports during the discovery process; if so, get them out now because they can provide inspiration. Some applications don't even generate reports, but most have at least one or two.

Reports are usually the final product of the application and often tell the application's story. For instance, the plants database might provide reports you can store to use as records of your garden in future years .

Now, think about the types of gardening information you'd like to store on paper. You'd probably like a list of plants for general reference, or maybe you'd like to print mailing labels for seed companies. A report with pictures is always nice and can be extremely helpful during the planning stages. The possibilities are only as limited as your imagination .

Perhaps you'd like to print labels similar to the ones shown in Figure 4.8 for all your plants, sorted by their Latin names , so you can update your file folders. The report in Figure 4.9 would be useful for planning next year's garden plots. (You can learn more about reports in Chapter 9, "Printing Information with Reports," and Chapter 14, "Dressing Up Your Reports.")

Figure 4.8. You can use a label report for any data, not just address information.

Figure 4.9. Use this report to plan next year's garden.

The Absolute Minimum

The key point of this chapter is simple: Design your database before you build it. Even if you're itching to get started with the software, time taken now with pencil and paper will be repaid later with a database that's more efficient and easier to use.

In this chapter, you learned about

• The discovery process

• Dividing data into multiple but related tables

• How to see your data in terms of a database application