Reports in Access.  I think it is safe to assume that Microsoft has been doing something to attract buyers to their Office products.  There were several different database products out when Microsoft finally made its entry to the market space with Access.  Obviously, they gained a lot of advantages by bundling Access with their Office suite.  They also had some advantages over their competitors when it came to interfacing with their Windows operating systems.

But, for at least a few years, there was something called Crystal Reports that was generally quite a bit nicer to use than other report development kits.  I don't really know whether Microsoft bought them or copied them.   Oftentimes such things aren't entirely clear and can cause lawsuits.  But Microsoft developed one of the most pleasant interfaces for developing reports and this certainly gained them some competitive advantages.

In the latest versions of Access, report generation can often be done through a wizard.  The wizard is configured to actually write the underlying queries in many instances.  But it can usually be worthwhile to develop at least some sort of query to work from.

But it is still the case that even after a report has been generated using a wizard, it can be modified in design view.

Over time these report pages will get even more involved.  But since we are constrained by an eight week semester, we will focus primarily on the capabilities and steps in the report generation wizard.