A Report on Missoula Foodbank's Client's
Outside Sources of Income

 

Some Background.  We had the pretty involved form collecting quite a large variety of information on the clients of Missoula Foodbank.

mfb_clients.mdb

If you want to duplicate my steps you can do it in this database or one of your own creation.  But you are going to want to name your QUERIES and REPORTS slightly differently than the names I've used so you do not overwrite those that already exist.  But all the other names should match as exactly as you can.  Or you can work in a copy of mfb_clients.mdb.

The first step is to open the database and select the queries.  Generally, I choose to first develop a query to base a report on.  The report design wizard can often create the underlying query without you doing it or creating an underlying query at all.  But creating an underlying query has its advantages.  In this particular instance we can develop a summary query which will give us somewhat more information than we can easily develop in the report wizard.

I chose to develop this query using the query wizard.  I will present images of the forms at the more important and complicated steps.

The first step requires us to use the clients table and select the following fields to be included in the query.

  • public_cash_assistance

  • social_security

  • ssi

  • unemployment_comp

  • workmans_comp

  • va

  • school_grants

  • retirement_pension

This results in the next image at the first step of the wizard.

 

 

Then you click on the Next button and

do not choose any grouping levels

do not choose any sort order

you should choose a display, though I chose to use a tabular display with landscape layout since there are so many fields.

Then you get to a step that allows you to create a summary query.

 

 

Then you want to click on the Summary Options button.  This brings up the following subform which I filled out like displayed.

 

 

This will give us
  • counts,
  • averages
  • minimum
  • maximum

for each field.

Then I saved this as

qry_outside_sources_summary

so that I can pull it into a report in hopes the display will be more desirable.

When starting the report wizard, you want to base the report on this query and select all of the fields.  This is shown in the following image.

 

 

Notice that we have a lot of fields we didn't have before

  • Avg of public_cash_assistance

  • Min of public_cash_assistance

  • Max of public_cash_assistance

  • Avg of social_security

  • Min of social_security

  • Max of social_security

  • Avg 0f ssi

  • Min 0f ssi

  • Max 0f ssi

  • Avg of unemployment_comp

  • Min of unemployment_comp

  • Max of unemployment_comp

  • Avg of workmans_comp

  • Min of workmans_comp

  • Max of workmans_comp

  • Avg of va

  • Min of va

  • Max of va

  • Avg of school_grants

  • Min of school_grants

  • Max of school_grants

  • Avg of retirement_pension

  • Min of retirement_pension

  • Max of retirement_pension

We get all of these fields because they were created to store the results of the summary query in a table like resultset.

In this report wizard we choose a lot of obvious options.

no groupings

no sorting

tabular/landscape display

formal format

Well, some of these can readily be chosen differently!

Ultimately, we get a three page report that isn't all that much better than just printing out the resultset of the query.  But we get some additional formatting.