Basic Reports

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this section of the course,
• 00:05 we're going to take a look at how we can run reports in Access.
• 00:09 Now, before we get on to reports, just a couple of things to note
• 00:13 about the form that we were working on in the last lesson.
• 00:16 I've just gone ahead and
• 00:18 I've made a couple of adjustments to the way these related tickets were laid out.
• 00:24 So, I've actually changed it to Related Ticket not related ticket number just to
• 00:28 give it a bit more room.
• 00:29 And I've moved all of the fields a bit closer together, so
• 00:32 we don't have to scroll as much in order to see that end date.
• 00:36 The final little change I'm going to make here is just to
• 00:39 give my form a meaningful name.
• 00:41 So, we're going to right-click and go into Design View.
• 00:44 So, we're going to change the caption over in the Property Sheet to
• 00:48 Ticket, Maintenance.
• 00:52 And if I wanted to, I could go down to Font Weight, and
• 00:57 I'm actually going to make this Bold or like so.
• 01:01 Let's just get this form one final view.
• 01:04 I think that's starting to look pretty good.
• 01:06 So, let's close down a Ticket Maintenance form and talk about reports.
• 01:11 Now it might be from time to time, or maybe even on a regular basis,
• 01:15 you want to run off a report for your database, and
• 01:18 you can set up reports to contain information that's most useful to you.
• 01:23 So, all the time when it comes to your report creation,
• 01:26 it really is very bespoke.
• 01:28 For example, I might want to run off a weekly report that shows me all of
• 01:32 the high priority calls from the week.
• 01:34 Or maybe I want to run a report that shows me all of the tickets logged in the last
• 01:39 three days.
• 01:40 Or maybe I want to run off a report where the SLA is about to expire.
• 01:44 So, you can really tailor your reports to your needs.
• 01:48 So, maybe I want to run a really basic report, which is going to
• 01:51 show me all of the companies that we have listed in the database.
• 01:56 So, we're going to go up to the Create tab.
• 01:58 And in the Reports section we have a few different options in here,
• 02:02 and we're going to use the Report Wizard, which will guide us through the process.
• 02:07 So, the first thing we need to select is which fields we want to report on.
• 02:12 If I just want a list of the companies,
• 02:15 then I can just choose the field from Table Company.
• 02:20 And that is a table that only contains one field.
• 02:23 So, I'm going to put that across to the Selected Fields area.
• 02:26 Let's click on Next.
• 02:27 I can now choose how I want to sort my records.
• 02:31 And if I click the drop down here, I have a choice of none,
• 02:33 which isn't going to provide any sort whatsoever.
• 02:36 Or I can choose to sort on any of the fields in the table.
• 02:40 Now we only have one field, so
• 02:42 I'm going to sort on company in ascending order.
• 02:46 Let's click on Next.
• 02:49 I can now choose a layout for my report.
• 02:51 And if I click on Column,
• 02:53 now you can see I'm going to have report headings in the dark orange.
• 02:56 And then the data Tabular is going to be more of that table structure.
• 03:01 And Justified is organized in a very slightly different way.
• 03:04 I would recommend you have a play around with these different layers to see which
• 03:07 one you prefer.
• 03:09 Now we're going to choose Tabular and we can then specify the Orientation for
• 03:13 this report.
• 03:14 So, I'm going to leave mine on Portrait Orientation.
• 03:17 I could also choose to adjust the field width so all fields fit on a page.
• 03:22 Now, that's not really relevant in this example, because we only have one field,
• 03:26 but I'm just going to leave it ticked anyway.
• 03:29 Let's click on Next.
• 03:30 Now I can give my reports a name.
• 03:33 So, sticking with our naming convention I like to call my reports rpt,
• 03:39 and this is going to produce the CompanyList.
• 03:43 I want to preview the report, so let's click on Finish.
• 03:47 And there we go,
• 03:48 we just have a big long list of all of the companies from table company.
• 03:53 Notice that now that we've created this report in the navigation pane,
• 03:56 we now have a new category called Reports, and we can see our report underneath.
• 04:01 Now when you're in reports, if you right-click on the tab,
• 04:05 notice that we have a different view, and that is Report View.
• 04:09 So, this effectively gives you a preview as to what it's going to look like to
• 04:12 the users.
• 04:13 Also, notice that we have a contextual ribbon called Print Preview.
• 04:18 And this is where we can really define how we want our report to look.
• 04:22 So, I can print my report from here.
• 04:25 I can choose the size for my report, or what paper I'm using for my report.
• 04:30 Now, in the UK and Europe, mostly we use A4, but if you're in the US,
• 04:34 you're probably going to use something like Letter size.
• 04:38 I can adjust my margins.
• 04:39 So currently, I have them set to Narrow.
• 04:42 So, I'm getting the maximum amount of information on the page,
• 04:46 but I could set those to wide or maybe even normal.
• 04:50 Now, I'm going to keep mine on Narrow.
• 04:53 I can choose Portrait or Landscape, and
• 04:56 if I want my page divided up into columns, so more of a newspaper style layout.
• 05:01 I have Page Setup options in here as well where I can really get very granular about
• 05:05 the measurements that I'm using for things like, the Top,
• 05:08 the Bottom, the Left, and the Right margins.
• 05:11 I have more page customizations underneath the Page tab, and
• 05:15 then a Columns tab just here where I can really specify the size of my columns if
• 05:20 I've chosen to use that format.
• 05:23 In the next group, we have a Zoom button.
• 05:25 So, I can choose to zoom out of my report or zoom back in.
• 05:32 I can display it as one page, or if I have multiple pages to my report,
• 05:36 I could choose Two Pages, or Four, Eight, or Twelve Pages.
• 05:40 And I'm going to put the zoom back to 100%.
• 05:44 And then finally on the end, I can even choose if I want to export this list or
• 05:49 save this report as an Excel file, a Text file, a PDF,
• 05:52 or I can choose to email it, so effectively create an attachment.
• 05:57 And then finally at the end, we can simply close out of the Print Preview,
• 06:01 which is going to put us back into Design View.

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