From the course: Access Essential Training (Office 365/Microsoft)

Introduce reports

From the course: Access Essential Training (Office 365/Microsoft)

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Introduce reports

- [Instructor] Reports prepare your data for printed output. They gather input records from tables and queries and then add formatting and page layout capabilities in order to organize the data and make it more legible. As you can see on the create tab on the ribbon in the reports group, there is lots of different ways to create a report. They share many of the same design principles that we've already seen when creating forms including the same use of control objects, and various similar design and layout views. The easiest way to get started creating a basic report is to use the one click report button here on the tab. First, you need to click the table or query you'd like to build the report off of. I'll make sure that we choose the check in details query that we created earlier in the course. Then come up to the reports group on the create tab and press the report button. Access creates the report and places us in layout view. Just like with forms, we can use layout view to alter the spacing and positions of the report's fields. The dash line around the borders of the report indicate the printable margins of the page. You can see that we have some fields spilling off over onto the adjacent pages over here on the right. Let's go ahead and adjust the width of each of these columns, so that everything fits on to a single page. Let's go ahead and click anywhere in this first column, and then we'll go over to the right side of that and just drag it in to make it narrower. We'll do the same thing to the last name column, the phone number, and finally the day of the week. So now everything will fit within the width of a single piece of paper. I can also adjust the text layout. I'm gonna make the room id field right aligns, so it's a little bit easier to read. Select any cell in that column, and then go to the format tab and click the right align text button. We'll do the same thing with the header here that says room id, so it that lands on top of the data. Just go ahead and select it, and press the right align button again. Access also let's around every text field with a box, and I find this to be pretty distracting. We can remove these boxes by selecting each column. Just hold down the shift key, and go ahead and select through all of these. Then on the format tab in the control formatting group, click on the shape outline drop down menu, and come down and choose transparent. Then, I'll go ahead and click at the very top of the report just to deselect everything, and we can see that each line is a lot easier to read now that they're not surrounded by a box on every cell. We can then switch into print preview view to get a preview of what this will look like. Let's go back to the home tab. Click on the bottom portion of the view button and choose print preview. This will give us a simulation of what it will look like on a printed pice of paper. You can go ahead and click anywhere on the screen here in the middle to zoom out to see the full page. Let's go ahead and save our report. I'll come up to the quick access tool bar and press the save icon. It's gonna ask me for report name, and I'll just leave it check in details, and say okay. Then in our navigation pane, we'll see we have a new group here called reports. And there is the check in details report that we just created. So that's what access created for us without asking for any input. It's just that basic design that can get you started, and we can use it to build off of using the tools available to us in the layout and design views.

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