I’m setting up a small DB for our office and the major user wants to create reports on the fly.
When I ask what he wants, he wants the world, such as “How many meetings between 2/2/2002
and 5/5/2002 were attended by armadillos with brown eyes and green hair, who brought large
handbags with them”, or a similar report with percentage rather than total. He’s created a few
reports from Excel and wants to be able to do the same thing from the Access DB I’m building
with about the same amount of learning curve as the Excel reports. Unless there’s a Report
Wizard that has a fast learning curve, I know from experience that he doesn’t have the patience to
learn how to create queries (even using wizards) and reports (even from templates), and I don’t
have the time to do it for him.
That’s the bad news. The sort of good news is that although the DB is relational, he’s only
interested in the data from one table in the DB.
I’m thinking of something like this, but haven’t tried to implement it yet.
1. He brings up a report template.
2. The report template calls a form with a checkboxes or option boxes. Essentially a menu from
which he can select what he wants for the report. Example is as follows:
* OptionButtons for [attended], a checkbox field: Total attended; Average attended; Percent
attended
* Criteria for [DateAttended], a date field: From_________ To__________
3. Each check item has a string attached to it and the checked items are converted to strings that
are used to create a SELECT statement, which in turn modifies/creates an on-the-fly query used
by a report.
4. When done, the form returns the user to a screen display of the created report, which he can
then either re-do, print, or cancel.
I’m still thinking about how to approach this. Is something like the above reasonably feasible? Is
there a better way to create on-the-fly reports that he can do with a minimal learning curve?
Thanks
When I ask what he wants, he wants the world, such as “How many meetings between 2/2/2002
and 5/5/2002 were attended by armadillos with brown eyes and green hair, who brought large
handbags with them”, or a similar report with percentage rather than total. He’s created a few
reports from Excel and wants to be able to do the same thing from the Access DB I’m building
with about the same amount of learning curve as the Excel reports. Unless there’s a Report
Wizard that has a fast learning curve, I know from experience that he doesn’t have the patience to
learn how to create queries (even using wizards) and reports (even from templates), and I don’t
have the time to do it for him.
That’s the bad news. The sort of good news is that although the DB is relational, he’s only
interested in the data from one table in the DB.
I’m thinking of something like this, but haven’t tried to implement it yet.
1. He brings up a report template.
2. The report template calls a form with a checkboxes or option boxes. Essentially a menu from
which he can select what he wants for the report. Example is as follows:
* OptionButtons for [attended], a checkbox field: Total attended; Average attended; Percent
attended
* Criteria for [DateAttended], a date field: From_________ To__________
3. Each check item has a string attached to it and the checked items are converted to strings that
are used to create a SELECT statement, which in turn modifies/creates an on-the-fly query used
by a report.
4. When done, the form returns the user to a screen display of the created report, which he can
then either re-do, print, or cancel.
I’m still thinking about how to approach this. Is something like the above reasonably feasible? Is
there a better way to create on-the-fly reports that he can do with a minimal learning curve?
Thanks
