4.5. Exporting an Access Report to Excel

Use this feature at your own risk. When you open up an Access report, you can use the Export function from the File menu to save the report in a variety of formats. When you select Export, Access will bring up the Export To dialog box that looks like the typical Save As Windows dialog. You can change the file type by changing the Save As Type drop down box. If you need to keep the formatting and want it to look exactly like it does on the screen, your best bet is to use the Snapshot format. At the time of writing this, users can get the Snapshot viewer free from Microsoft. The other option, outside of Office, is to use a PDF printer to print the document to a PDF file that can be opened with Adobe Acrobat. If you don't have that option, the Snapshot viewer is your only choice if you want it to look exactly the same. These two options are the only ones that preserve controls. This is very important if you have charts that you want to share.

If you just want the basic data to be presented, I suggest using the Export function from the File menu to save it in Rich Text Format. This allows the report to be opened in Microsoft Word. The next choice on my list would be to save it as an HTML file. Exporting a report into an Excel format works, but I have found that the formatting and the layout with the subtotals, etc. are very clunky. So, this is the one area that I suggest that you either automate Excel using the query results directly or use something other than Excel when dealing with reports.