Printing of 52-page Phonebook

[Kathy]

Our community has used Publisher to publish it's phonebook.
This phonebook has 52 pages which are printed in 2 columns
one each page. A page is either the left or the right half
of a sheet of paper long side up (landscape). It is
additionally printed on both sides of a sheet. The result
is a similar in appearance to a handbook.

As our community has grown, updates have become
complicated. It has been suggested that we would find
Access easier to use. While we can create a report in the
format we want, we cannot determine how to get the pages to
number correctly.

We need the pages to print so that one sheet, when folder
in half, will contain the alphabetical data for page 1 on
top, page 2 on the reverse of that half, then page 51 on
the other half of the page 2 side, and page 52 "behind"
page 51 (and therefore page 52 is printed to the left of
page 1). While we know that this requires the pages to be
printed in two separate processes (printing one side at a
time), we do not know how to get the pages to number
themselves in the correct sequence using Access.

Again, must we stick with Publisher to accomplish the
printing layout we need, or is there a way in Access?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Sam]

Access does not include such functionality, however it can be done using VBA
code. I've done it for school reports where each sudent's report is 8-12
pages and there are perhaps 1000 or more students. As your situation is a
one off (or every so often) booklet then it's really not worth the effort.
I'd suggest you just copy the info and paste it into publisher.

HTH
Sam

 

[Larry Linson]

There are third-party products which install as a printer and print
"booklets". In fact, my printer's driver has a "booklet" option (but it
doesn't quite work on more than 4 pages <SIGH>). I have, in the past, used
Blue Squirrel's ClickBook for this purpose, but when I tried to use it with
Windows 2000 Pro and my Epson C80, it reports to me that the driver is a
PostScript driver (though I really don't think that is the case) and tells
me to install another driver for the printer (and, as far as I know, I
downloaded the only W2K driver that Epson has for the C80). Thus, I'd be
reluctant to recommend it, as I don't know whether it would work with your
configuration. I think there are other products of the type, but I'm not
familiar with any of them. Recent versions of Microsoft Word have an option
of this kind, and you should be able to use MailMerge, I'd think, as a
simple way to get your data from Access into Word.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP