Interactive Reports

[Eli the Iceman]

Is Microsoft planning on making the reports in MS Access interactive, like
links? There is a need outthere for reports to not be printed, but rather
viewed on a screen and then follow links for associated data. Acrobat has
jumped on this option, but I would love to see MS Access offer the same
thing. My corporation is nearly 100,000 employees and we use MS Office for
all of our business.

Thanks,

 

[Marshall Barton]

Is Microsoft planning on making the reports in MS Access interactive, like
links? There is a need outthere for reports to not be printed, but rather
viewed on a screen and then follow links for associated data. Acrobat has
jumped on this option, but I would love to see MS Access offer the same
thing. My corporation is nearly 100,000 employees and we use MS Office for
all of our business.

There is no such feature in existing versions of Access.
Any features that are being contemplated for future versions
are under NDA so those folks that might know the answer to
your question are not permitted to answer. Anyone that does
answer doesn't have sufficient information to make the
answer meaningful. Even if MS makes the information
available, there is no guarantee that it won't change before
a future version is publicly available.

 

[Klatuu]

Marshall's comments on what can or cannot be discussed are dead on.

But, if you need to present data to users that gives them the ability to
drill down through available data, you might investigate the use of the
Treeview control and following Hyperlinks which can be done in Access.
Granted, it is not a report, but the net effect of what you are suggesting
can be accomplished with this technique. Even using subdatasheets is a step
in this direction.

I am not sure anyone knows what MS is planning now or what the current plan
will evolve into (you should have seen some of the ideas for the new UI for
Office 2007 that got toosed), but in the real world today, Interactive
Reports = Forms <g>.

 

[Eli the Iceman]

Thanks Gents, I do understand and agree on what you are saying. And yes I
ceveloped a form that looks just like a report, but the negative is that you
can't get growing subforms to fit all of the data, instead you have to scroll
down and it defeats the purpose. I do like the idea of treeview, but I have
no idea what it is, so I will have to research. I managed to output the
report to HTML. but I lose all of the graphics, then I tried to PDF, but the
links are lost. It seems that everything I try has a strong drawback.

Thanks again,

 

[Klatuu]

Here is one reference to a Treeview Control:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/vbcnut/chapter/ch05-tv.html

Google Treeview and you can find a lot of information.

 

[Eli the Iceman]

Thank you very much, I will explore, I really appreciate your help and
services!!