Printing Forms vs. Printing Reports

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Although Access allows users to print forms, when Access forms are printed the format generally isn’t as attractive or as useful as a properly designed report. Because of the essential difference in purpose between forms and reports, forms don’t print well. Forms are designed to display data one record at a time, or perhaps (for datasheet and continuous forms) several records at a time. Forms display all the data you want to see for each record, and they typically use color (even if it’s only a light gray background) and other decorative elements to make it easier to enter, review, and edit data one record at a time. When you print a form, you get page after page of complete data, with colored backgrounds, combo boxes, option groups, and command buttons. These elements are distracting on a printed page and don’t have any practical use.

What you usually want in a report is a compact listing or summary of selected data, suitable for review on the printed page. Reports rarely show complete records. Instead, they typically display multiple records per page, often with subtotals or other summary data, grouped by significant fields. Some design elements that are functional on forms (such as combo boxes, option groups, and tab controls) have no function on reports (you can’t click a command button on a piece of paper!), and background color on reports makes them hard to read and slow to print.

note


Certain design elements work only on reports, such as the RunningSum property (used to create running sums), group levels (used to separate data into bands), and the CanGrow and CanShrink properties of text boxes (used to accommodate text of different sizes). See the section "Neat Report Tricks," for more information about how to use these special report control properties.

As an example of what happens when you print a form optimized for entering and editing data (and why you shouldn’t!), try printing fpriBooksAndVideos (the primary form in the Crafts database on the companion CD). The form header is printed on the first page (although its command buttons and record selector combo boxes are non-functional and confusing when printed on paper), and the footer is printed on the last sheet. The tab control with its subforms isn’t printed, which is appropriate (since it, too, is useless on a report), but a large space is printed where the tab control would be. Figure 7-1 shows page 3 of the fpriBooksAndVideos form in print preview.

figure 7-1. the fpribooksandvideos form in print preview shows that printing a form is not the best way to review data.

Figure 7-1. The fpriBooksAndVideos form in print preview shows that printing a form is not the best way to review data.

It would be difficult to use a printout of the fpriBooksAndVideos form to review the books and videos in the Crafts database. A printed version of the form is simply page after page of data in no particular order, gray background and all, with some elements missing and no report headers or footers. Furthermore, only the first record of linked data (Authors or Specialties, for example) is displayed for each record.

A properly designed report, on the other hand (such as the rptBooksAndVideos report, described later in this chapter), lists relevant information (usually just a subset of the fields in the data source) grouped by one or more fields (in this report, just the Title field), in a simple black-and-white layout that uses lines or rectangles sparingly so that the report can be printed quickly and is highly readable.



Microsoft Access Version 2002 Inside Out
Microsoft Access Version 2002 Inside Out (Inside Out (Microsoft))
ISBN: 0735612838
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 172
Authors: Helen Feddema

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