Microsoft® Access® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

44

Report Sorting, Grouping, and Totals

Another very important part of building reports in Access is displaying the data in the report in the manner that you want it to be displayed. Often this requires that you sort and group the data to get the desired output in the report. For example, you may want to create a report for your Customers table that sorts and groups each customer shown in the report by the first letter of their last names. Fortunately, Access 2010 provides the Group, Sort, and Total pane to make it very easy to manipulate the way the data in a report is displayed. This lesson discusses the basics of working with the data in Access reports and provides an overview of how to use the Group, Sort, and Total pane.

LESSON SETUP

To begin working with reports with the Group, Sort, and Total pane, you must have a report to work with in a database and preferably some data to work with in that report. You can easily create a new report or just use an existing one that is already in a database; it doesn't really matter for the purpose of this lesson. The important part in this lesson is that the report has some data.

SHOWING DATA IN ACCESS REPORTS

In previous lessons, you used the Access Field List pane to drag and drop fields from preexisting tables into reports, so that the data from those fields would be displayed in the report. When the user performs this drag-and-drop operation from the Field List, Access is simply creating a new TextBox control and placing it in the ...