Formatting report: Press Ctrl-Break to Stop

[yellowmetal]

Microsoft Access report takes extremely long time. Message on bottom of screen is "Formatting Report: Press Ctrl-Break to Stop"

Solution is to remove the formatting of the number of pages (Page xx of yy).

Instead of
="Page " & [Page] & " of " [Pages]

use
="Page " & [Page]

Reason is that Access will try to format the entire report before showing results.
Other things can help as well but eliminating page xx of yy is critical.

Page Preview as the default view and Page size as normal 8,5 by 11 paper is good.
Eliminating "order by" in the underlying queries is good.
You can have embedded sub reports.

 

[SkipVought]

Hi,

Welcome to Tek-Tips.

Is there a question here? It appears that this is a tip, and here at Tek-Tips, an independent tip, not related to a question posted by a member, is often posted in a FAQS in the appropriate forum.

Please take some time to observe what goes on here and discover how it's all done.

 

[yellowmetal]

Sorry. This was in response to thread703-627306.
I did not see the thread identifier. Sorry.

 

[strongm]

Er ... that was a post from almost 12 years ago.

 

[yellowmetal]

Some of us are still using Access 2002 front ends with SQL Server back ends. I have been looking for the solution to the problem for about two months and finally got a hint that the page xx of page yy could be a problem. It was.

Bottom line, old software does not have to die.