Access 2010: The Missing Manual

The Report Wizard

Creating a report in Design view is a labor of love. Adding and arranging the controls you need takes time. Since the average Access fanatic is about as patient as a caffeine junkie in New York City traffic, Microsoft decided to add a shortcut for quickly generating different types of reports. That shortcut is the Report wizard.

Note

The Report wizard lets you more easily create a report that doesn’t use a layout, provided you like the preset options it gives you for arranging controls. If you want to create a simple report that uses a layout (as you did in Chapter 10), then you don’t have to use the Report wizard—you can create the report you need in one step (Creating a One-Click Report).

The Report wizard asks a few basic questions, and then creates the corresponding report. You can then tweak it to your heart’s content in Design view. Here’s how it works:

1. Choose Create→Reports→Report Wizard.

   The Report wizard’s first step appears.

2. From the drop-down list, choose the table you want to use.

   In the Available Fields list, the wizard shows all the fields in your table.

   You’ll probably recognize this window, because it’s exactly the same as the one you use to start building a query with the Query wizard.

3. Add the fields you want to include, as shown in Figure 11-10. When you’re finished, click Next.

   You can choose fields from more than one table, provided these tables are related.

4. If your report uses the fields from just one table, skip ahead to the next ...