At some point, you're probably going to want to
present some of your data to another person,
and Access lets you create professional looking reports to do this.
Just like a query, a report can pull in information from one or more tables or queries,
but it gives you a lot more control over how the
data looks on the page.
In this video, we're just going to focus on making
a simple report based on a single query.
I'm going to open Orders Query, but you can use
any table or query that you want.
And then in the Create tab, click the Report command, and your report should instantly
appear.
Now it's probably not going to look perfect, so at
this point you can clean up the layout,
and to do this you'll need to make sure you're in Layout View.
In this report, some of these columns are too
wide, so I need to adjust them.
When you click on a column, a yellow border will
appear,
and you can drag the edge to change the width.
And I'm adjusting each column just enough to make
everything fit on the page.
If you make your columns too narrow, then you may
cut off some of your data.
You can also get rid of any extra fields that you
don't need.
We probably don't need the zip code in this report
so I'll delete it by pressing the delete key.
And I'll also delete the title and these empty cells.
I'm going to scroll through the report now to make
sure everything looks right.
And if any elements are outside this dotted line,
then they're going to be off the page when you
print it, so I'm going to drag this page number over to the left.
Now one thing you can't do within a report is edit
records.
However, you can sort and filter them.
I want to just show the orders from December,
so I'll right click the Pickup Date column,
and then go to Date Filters, All Dates In Period, and select December.
And I'd also like these dates to be sorted.
I'll right click them again, and choose Sort Oldest to Newest.
When you're done changing the layout, you can
switch to Report View.
And this will let you view it without the gridlines.
And finally, we should save this report.
I'll call it December Orders.
And now, we have a report that we can come back to
at any time
if we want to make any changes or print it.