Designing Reports
The best way to become familiar with how to design reports is to start with the basics. Once you understand how the designer and the individual report objects work, you’ll be ready to move on to advanced topics of report design (and finally start doing something fun!)
The default view of the Design tab is divided into five sections: Report Header, Page Header, Details, Report Footer, and Page Footer. Each section determines where its related data appears on the report. Table 2-2 gives you a summary of each section.
Table 2-2. The five report sections.
| Section Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Report Header | Appears at the top of the first page of the report. It only appears once on a report. |
| Page Header | Appears at the top of the page. It is repeated on each page. For the first page of a report it appears after the Report Header. |
| Group Header | Shown when before the first record in new group is printed. Although not shown initially shown in a blank report, it appears when you add a grouping field to the report. This is covered in Chapter 3. |
| Details | A Detail row is printed for every record selected from the database. It usually makes up the bulk of the report content. |
| Group Footer | Shown after the last record in a group is printed. |
| Page Footer | Appears at the bottom of the page. It is repeated on each page. For the last page of a report, it appears before the Report Footer. |
| Report Footer | Appears at the end of the last page of the report. It only appears once on a report. |
If you think of a report as a book, the Report Header is like the Title Page or the Preface. It appears at the very beginning of the report and can be used to display a corporate logo, the report title, the date and time the report was printed, or even an introductory paragraph explaining the purpose of the report. The Report Header is also useful for displaying summary information to the user. For example, by showing some carefully thought out charts, the user can get an overview of the data that is shown within the report.
Continuing with the book analogy, the Page Header typically shows non-data information on each page. Some examples are the page number and field headers. For reports that have many columns of data, it’s important to display the column headers in the Page Header. This keeps the user from having to flip back to the first report page to see what each number represents.
The Details section of the report is where the true content of the report appears. This is the primary section for displaying the database fields and it gets repeated for each record.
The Page Footer, like the Page Header, usually displays non-data fields. This could be the page number, report author or the print date. Sometimes it is used to print summaries of the data on that page.
The Report Footer typically displays summary information for all the data in the report. This includes a grand total for the numeric columns as well as displaying summary calculations such as the total number of records printed.
Although I listed general suggestions for what is shown in each section, this is not a hard and fast rule. For example, I said that the Page Header usually shows non-data information. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t put database fields and formulas in the Page Header. A report that prints invoices will use the Page Header to show the customer’s name and address as well as the P.O. Number. The Page Footer shows the invoice total, any applicable discounts, and the payment terms. Proper use of graphics in each section helps highlight different parts of a report and gives it a touch of class. Remember that the key to designing professional reports is to be creative with object placement, but not over do it.
