Design View.  I have been making use of the reports wizard because it really is very effective for so many situations.  You can make it even more effective by developing useful resultsets using the QBE query designer.

But now I want to spend some time looking at the overall design view for reports.  If you open the design view you are likely to see something like the following.  Though, by default there are fewer sections.

• The Report Header and Footer may not appear by default in your design view.  You can get them to appear by clicking on the item in the View menu.
  • whatever is in these sections will appear only once at the beginning for the Header and end for the Footer of the entire report.
    • might contain the report title
    • might contain the report date
• The Page Header and Footer appear at the beginning and end of each page.
• The Group Header and Footer appear only if you select some field to use for grouping under the Sorting and Grouping item in the View menu.
  • the name of the field used for the grouping will appear before the words Header and Footer in the design view.
• The Detail section contains the details of the report.

You should look at some of the reports we have developed using the wizard within the report design view.  It will help give you more insight about what is actually done to develop these reports.  You should also know you can format and move the entries in the design view.

There are a large number of options available and I hope that the previous examples have acquainted you with some of the most important.

Inserting Things.  You can also use items in the Insert menu in design view to insert things such as current dates, time and different formats for page numbering. 

By default, dates and page numberings are included when reports are developed using the report wizard.  But you can still remove them, move them to other sections of the report and reformat them.

You can also insert other things so that a more complete list is

• date
• page numbers
• objects
• Activex controls
• hyperlinks

Report Snapshots.  You can use snapshots to generate report files with .snp extensions that are easily distributed and used by people that do not have Access on their computers.

To create a snapshot you should go through the following steps.

• Select the name of the report in the database controller form/window
  • choose File | Export
• The Export Report As dialog appears where you choose the snapshot format in the Save As type box.
• Choose where you want to export to.
• Click Save

The Snapshot can be sent using the Send command in the Snapshot Viewer.