Minmia said:
Forgot to mention - I am using Access 2003 - will this work?
Unfortunately that video is only for 2007.
However, looking at it should make you jealous. MS access for years has
always had a great report later, I don't think they've changed it for about
fifteen years, and finally I think the rest the industry's finally caught up
to that incredible part of MS access that we love so much called the report
writer.
In access 2007 they much redesigned parts of the report writer and as you
see in the above video, the grouping and stacked controls simply saves one
huge amounts of time. The number of times I said how dumb it is that if I
want to remove a column in the report that I had to delete the label in
the report's headings section, then move all the labels to the right of that
space over. And, it always painstakingly difficult to move those labels
"just" the right amount to fill that gap (hole).
Worse after you painstakingly moved the label text box headings over in the
heading part, you now have to go down into the detail section and remove the
text box, and again to move all the text boxes over to the left again by an
*exact* amount if you don't want to waste any space.
Finally in this modern day and age no more do you have to do this ridiculous
amount work and with those stacked + Grouped controls, you can simply whack
the delete button and your done..the column goes always and everything to
the right moves left for you. What a fantastic improvement in usability for
the MS access report writer. I am really very hard pressed to think of
anything that's been added to MS access that is such a leap in terms of
productivity when a user designs reports. This really is a wonderful new
feature. Keep in mind that this stacked Grouped control system also works
when you're building a form, and once again it just saves a huge amount of
time (in fact when placing a bunch of buttons across the top of a form to
mimic a menu bar type system, with stacked controls when you delete (or
insert) a button all buttons move to make (or reduce) room for you.
how can I get to fit on one page?
If you'll notice in the above video, the new report later has a nice dotted
bar that shows you the limits or the right side of your report. The
advantage of this of course is then you don't get all those nasty blank
pages that so many users complain about because they've placed too many
controls into the detail section and the report becomes too wide to fit on a
single page. Keep in mind that this dotted bar also reflects your layout,
therefore if you change the layout of the form to landscape than that dotted
bar moves over to just the point in which you can fit all your controls for
a
report designed in landscape mode. Go past that dotted bar and you'll get
those extra blank pages that we all dislike. Once again this is just a
really nice feature in access 2007.
While there is no "auto size" option to set the column width for the largest
size data in that column, you can at least now size columns in that layout
view, and when you do that you've Visually viewing the data that your
resizing in place that flipping between preview in design mode as previous
versions of access forced you to do.
However you don't have access 2007, so none of the above really applies to
you.
You're really only solution is to simply resize the control by your
"best" guess and then flip back and forth between print preview mode and
design mode as you re-size things to your satisfaction.
)