Report Design - is it always Tedious? 2

[ebrooks54]

I'm totally new to programming/designing in Access, and I am impressed to a certain extent how easy it is to do things, and how easy it is to add code to events.

However, from playing around with reports and forms, I get the feeling that it can be pretty mind-numbing to get things lined up and formatted properly. IE, it took me an hour or more to place a dozen or so fields on a report and get them so that they were just right. (...move fieldb 2 dots to the right because after running the report fielda was 1 dot too short to accomodate the largest value...)

For instance, after placing a field on the report one really doesn't know if the default size will accomodate the whole field (as far as I can tell). I find after placing all my fields, I have to keep switching back and forth from run/design to see how the report is shaping up. I find myself wishing that there was some sort of 'immediate window', that would query the tables involved and create a pseudo 'super record' (populated with 9's and X's) that will show how the detail line would look instantly while designing.

End of rant.

Are there any guidelines or advice in how to do it right in a reasonable amount of time?

 

[KenReay]

Hi

In my experience report/form design is teh most time consuming part of any development. I am a freelance developer and often have to quote a fixed price to do a given job, my usual method is to estimate the number of forms/reports and then multply by a factor to give mandays, my reasoning for this is taht the other tasks pale into insignificance in comparison.

Having said that there are some useful things you can do in Access to ease the pain, eg using the align left, space equally etc available in the designer, and using the appropriate properties to allow text boxes to 'wrap' onto next line (for reports).

Finally, while I agree it is tedious, again in my experience it is no worse in Access than in in other currently available tool (eg Crystal Reports etc) with similar functionality.

I doubt if this actually helps, except now you know you are not alone!

Regards

Ken Reay
Freelance Solutions Developer
Boldon Information Systems Ltd
Website needs upgrading, but for now -

http://www.kenneth.reay.btinternet.co.uk

UK

 

[dhookom]

Ken has good points. Also note the Align Left and Space Equally involve selecting more than one control. There are many ways to select multiple controls.

One other tip is that as you drag to resize a text box, the status bar displays the number of lines and characters that can be displayed in the text box. If you increase the font size, the number of lines and characters decrease. I am not sure how accurate this is as it depends on your data values.

Duane
MS Access MVP

 

[TammyT]

Here's another tip - don't create the report in design view! Use the wizard to get just the BASIC report started; I've noticed that when I create a report this way, modifying it in Design View becomes easier (I'm not an ace programmer either!). Then you can add fields & grouping levels, format data, etc. as much as you want.