Access Reporting far superior to Cr*st*l, but not quite utopia

[BrianDP]

I've been working with Access for 15 years and I love it. I've found
ways to push my data through the reporting with Access' Sorting and
Grouping, which is very flexible. I don't know any other package that
is so easy to get something from Design to Implementation - Despite
what others poo poo about the program.

In the past, even when the reporting module has gotten me down, I've
been able to sort of "aseemble data ahead of time" and then pipe that
through the report.

Now I've come up against a situation where I have a very complicated
quote report that doesn't seem to lend itself to that sort of
assembly. The problem is page breaking. It's always a problem to get
page breaks that aren't in "traditional" places. Why does the user
want to page break at this place on the report one day, and page break
an inch up the next day? I have no idea. Why do users do what they
do?

One solution I considered was, having a page break control out to the
left of the report, and have it controlled by the user, the program
could ask pgBk.VerticalPosition = Inputbox("Where do you want the page
break this week?",,"6.5 in") But there are a lot of sub forms on the
page, and I'm not sure exactly how that is going to work. Will the
the break know that a subreport has expanded?

The other idea, was to have a column in the sub report that is
PROBABLY going to have the page break, and somehow in there, have a
colum in that table that would be all 1's and about 1/2 way down, or
wherever they want the page break, they could change the number to 2.
Group on that field, and again ,the user could control where the page
break would occur.

Sorry for being so long winded. Does anyone have any other tricks for
how to control page breaks for pesky users?

-BrianDP

 

[Allen Browne]

You say you have several subforms (subreports?), and need to *break* between
them? One option might be to put the different subreports into different
sections of the main report.

For example, say you have 2 subreports in the ClientID group footer. In the
Sorting'n'Grouping pane, you chose the ClientID field on 2 rows, so you have
2 different ClientID group footers. Put one subreport in each one. You can
now manipulate the page break between them much easier (either by setting
the Visible property of a PageBreak control as you suggested, or by setting
the ForceNewPage property of the group level in Report_Open.)

Even if you need 2 'detail sections', you can simulate this by creating a
group footer on the primary key value of the lowest level table (since the
primary key changes every record.)

May not do what you want, but it's another trick to keep up your sleeve.