Access 2002 Programming by Example

Taking Charge of Grouping and Sorting

The most common need for totals in the report is for groups of like values. For example, if you were in the insurance business, you might want to see all the claims for a particular year. If you were in sales, you might want to see the sales totals per region. Grouping gives you this capability. If you group by state, you might want to sort those groups. Within each state group you might want to sort the ZIP codes. This is a multi-level sort, which you can look at as a sort within a sort.

If you wanted to group all the values for a particular year in a query, you obviously have a problem if your date field is the value to group by. You will not have like values in that field because the dates will be distributed ...