Chapter 6: Reports, Controls, and Data

Overview

Your understanding of forms gained from the previous chapter will serve you well as you consider how to use reports in your applications. Although reports do not support interactive controls like forms do, you can populate reports with controls that display data, such as text boxes and check boxes. Reports can contain bound and unbound graphic images and ActiveX controls for special displays, such as charts . The charting capability for reports in Microsoft Access 2003 is similar to that of forms. You can design main reports with subreport controls, just as main forms can contain subform controls.

Access reports are sometimes the only contact a user has with a database. As a developer, you will likely encounter well-defined opinions from clients about what reports should convey and how they should arrange and summarize data. This chapter aims to qualify you to respond creatively and rapidly to user-generated report specifications.

The chapter begins with an introduction to techniques for building reports manually, but it later provides a demonstration of creating reports programmatically. Using one of the many Access report wizards is often a great first step to developing a custom report. Instead of building a default layout, you can spend your time customizing a wizard-generated report. This effort can include customizing the record source as well as making the report's content or formatting responsive to run-time specifications. If you're going to create new reports programmatically, or edit existing reports, you need a solid understanding of the Access report architecture and its Design-view environment. The summary of manually created reports covers these topics.

This chapter also addresses programmatic issues. It starts out by covering approaches for creating and deploying snapshots of Access reports. The chapter ends with an examination of methods for making existing reports dynamic through programming.