The Excel® Analyst's Guide to Access®

Chapter 11. Presenting Data with Access Reports

As an Excel analyst, you have no doubt created your fair share of Excel reports; complete with sorting, layout and formatting. But how often have you thought about creating your reports in Access? The truth is that most Excel analysts think of Access solely as a data store. Few analysts consider using Access' reporting layer (the Access Report object).

The Access Report is an incredibly powerful component of the Microsoft Access toolset. Acting as the presentation layer for your database, the Access Report allows you to easily integrate your database analysis with polished PDF-style reporting functionality, complete with grouping, sorting, and conditional formatting.

In this chapter, you explore Access Reports and discover how they can add a powerful new dimension to your reporting capabilities.

Access Report Basics

In this section, you create your first Access report and explore the different ways to view that report. After walking through this section, you'll have enough grounding to start building your own Access Reports.

Creating Your First Report

The first step in creating a report in Access is to define the data source for the report. The data used in any Access reports can come from either a Table or a Query. One of the easiest ways to define a data source for a report is to build a query specifically designed to feed your report.

For your first report, you'll use the Query_Products query. Select the query and click Report command ...