It always amazes me when users and developers design an Access database they pay a lot of attention to the designing and planning of the database structures – and of course this is very important.

The next step is usually building the objects starting with the Tables then Queries followed by the Forms and finally the Reports.

By the time they are onto the Reports, it seems a bit of an after thought and the designs are very basic because of the the time consuming element reports can take. It is important to spend time in the design view of an access database report which is as I say is overlooked a lot of the time.

This video tutorial is a good introduction as it covers the report wizard tool which everyone starts with (and a lot of the time that’s it!) followed by the switching between the different views showing you how to add groups, calculate and change the various key properties for a report. It even explains the footer calculation for pages and concatenation (look the word up!).

At the end of the day, if you are going to present the results to your customers or executives, you need good looking Access database reports and the report wizard tool will simply not do!

Tags: Adding Grouping Levels, Adding report Totals, calculating in an access report, Design View, Relational Database reporting, Report Wizard, Reports design view, Running access reports layout view