Creating a Report

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Creating a report

Last but not least, you will probably want to create a report of your database. Reports provide a nicely formatted display of data for printing out your records or even viewing them online. If you started a CD collection database, you may need to make a report of your inventory for your insurance company. For student records, you may need to make a report of all your students for the school office files. For your assignment, you will need to create a report for your database.

To create a report,

Click on the "Reports" tab in the main Access window.
Click "Create Report by Using a Wizard." This wizard will work much like the one you used to create a form.
Select the fields you want to include in your report then click the Next button. The next few screens will cover "grouping options," "sort order," "layout," and "style." For the assignment, you do not need to change any of these settings from the default, but you are welcome to explore and change these settings to suit your preferences.
The final screen asks you to give a name to your report, then you can choose to preview your report and click the Finish button. Our sample report, which has three records, is shown below. As you can see, I opted not to include the fields relating to the parent's information.

After previewing your report, close it. You will be able to access it again under the Report section of the main Access window. If you want to change the design of the report, you can do so by opening it in "design" view by clicking on the "design" button after selecting the report name. You may need to modify field lengths, so that the longer text in data fields is not cut off.

You may also display the report sorted in a different order. For example, the above report could be sorted by birthday instead of by last name. To do this, open the report in design view, go to the View menu and select "Sorting and Grouping." You can also click on its button on the toolbar, which looks like the following:

The Sorting and Grouping window will then appear as follows:

There is a drop-down menu in each cell. Under the "Field/Expression" column, you can choose the field you would like the table sorted by. Under the "Sort Order" column, you can select ascending or descending from the drop-down menu. Once you have set your preferences for sorting, close this window and preview your report again. You will notice the data has been rearranged according to your sort preferences.

When working in the design view, you may find yourself wanting to add a field to the report design that was not initially included (or perhaps you deleted the field and need to replace it).

To add a field not previously included in the report,

Go to the View menu
Select "Field List."
You may also click on the Field List icon on the toolbar, which looks like the following:
The Field List window is small and will look like the following for our sample database:

To add a field in the report design, simply click on the field name in the Field List window and drag it to the report window. The field and its description label will appear. Nice and easy!

Macros and modules will not be covered in this module. To learn more about these two topics, go to the Help menu and search them in the Index.

You have now completed the last lesson of this module. Please return to the main module page to review your assignment requirements by clicking here.