Scheduling Reports Issues or Suggestions

[sxschech]

We have several reports that were developed by a consultant to run under Oracle Reports. They are scheduled to run several times throughout the day. The problem is that we aren't too familiar with Oracle Reports and need to make quite a few changes to the underlying queries as well as the design. The query part, we are probably ok with, however, the design part is an obstacle. Because of this, we are considering recreating and running the reports in MS-Access. The reports have to be run several times a day and either emailed or uploaded to a folder on a server where the users can find them. I looked at a few threads that mentioned about the windows scheduler. I asked our IT person about a computer that is available 24hrs a day and was told that for something like that, I would need to do it on my own computer. If the repots need to scheduled and run from my desktop, will there be any issues/conflicts of having Access opening, running and closing (or whatever the procedure is for scheduled reporting) while working on the computer during the day either in Access or another program?
Any other suggestions for creating/running these kind of scheduled reports. We are using XP, Access 2003 (11.8166.8172) SP3, and Oracle 10G.

 

[dhookom]

I created an application many years ago that used a lot of different reports for a hospital. The back-end tables were Oracle so we used pass-through queries as much as possible. I had some tables that controlled the schedule and other information.

We kept a PC dedicated to the reporting and used windows scheduler to open Access and run code. The code would determine which reports were scheduled to be run and add them to a "cue". As reports were run, the cue table was updated so we had a log of which reports ran when.

Duane
Hook'D on Access
MS Access MVP