Chapter 3. Reports

You may devote days, weeks, or even months of work to designing tables and queries and writing the macros and code to put an application together, but along with your application's forms, its reports are the application. Because of this, you'll want make them as clear and attractive as possible.

The first solution in this chapter shows you how to do something that should be (and is) easy: printing a report with line numbers. Next, you'll learn how to print the value of query parameters on a report based on a parameter query and how to create an attractive multiple-column report.

The next group of solutions will teach you how to use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code and macros to print a message on a report only if certain conditions are met, how to create telephone-book-style page-range indicators, how to print a bar graph on a report using rectangle controls, and how to calculate page totals.

Next, you'll employ more challenging VBA code to work around the limitations of the CanGrow/CanShrink properties and prevent blank rows on reports by combining an entire address into a single expression for a mailing-label report. You'll see how to suppress printing a report if there are no records to print. Using an event procedure run from the report's Format event, you'll learn how to print one set of headers and footers on odd pages and another (mirror-image) set on even pages. Then you will learn how to use the Line method to draw lines or rectangles on a report—in this case, to make a line the same height as a variable-height text box. Next, you'll learn how to alternate gray bars on every other row of the report.

The final three solutions in this chapter show you how to tie a report's recordset to the filtered recordset of a form, how to prevent your report from breaking at an inappropriate place (such as right after a group header), and finally, in the most complex solution in this chapter, how to modify a report's grouping and sorting fields on the fly.