Office® XP Development with VBA

Working with Forms and Reports

Access forms and reports are similar in that they both display data to the user. They differ in that a form permits the user to enter and edit the data, while a report is for display only and does not permit changes to the data. If, for example, your users needed to enter order information into a database, you would design a form for that purpose. For printing the invoices to send to customers, you would use a report. Reports also let you take snapshots of them, so the report can be viewed outside of Access. Once a snapshot is taken, the report stops being dynamic—that is, it will no longer update to reflect changes in the data.

There are two steps to using a form or report in your custom Office application. First, ...