The Report Designer

Where a report has to look right on paper — a letter per school, a pay claim per teacher, anything with a letterhead and page numbers — build it in the Report Designer rather than saving a query view.

Start from New Report Design. A designed report is built visually as a set of bands, with each piece of content placed and sized inside one.

Page setup

The page itself has a size, an orientation — portrait or landscape — and margins. Set these first: they decide how much room the bands have.

Bands

Page header and footer — repeat on every physical page. This is where a title, logo, "week commencing" line, or page numbers go.

Report header and footer — appear once, at the very start and very end, rather than on every page.

Root band — the main body, one row per record.

Groups — a report can group its rows by a column, each group with its own header and footer. A group header might carry the teacher's name and address; a group footer a totals line for that teacher.

Groups nest. A report can group by Teacher, then by Contract inside each teacher's section, then list the individual sessions inside each contract. Group headers repeat automatically when a group runs over a page break.

What you can place in a band

Data	A column from the query
Text	A fixed label
Summary	A total, average, count, minimum or maximum
Formula	A value calculated per row
Local	A value calculated once for the whole run
Special	Page number, "page N of M", or the current date
Image	A logo or picture
Chart	A chart
Line, Rectangle	Rules and boxes for structure
Sub-report	Another whole report, embedded

Summary fields

A summary is scoped to the band it sits in. The same Sum placed in the root band gives a whole-report total; placed in a group footer, it gives the total for just that group. Available as Sum, Average, Count, Min and Max.

Formula fields and local fields

Both are small calculations written as an expression, and the difference is how often each is worked out.

Formula fields are calculated once per row — converting minutes to hours for each session, say. Use one anywhere a data field can go.

Local fields are calculated once per report run — a title line, or the date the report was produced.

If the value changes from row to row it is a formula field; if it is the same everywhere on the report, it is a local field.

Sub-reports

A sub-report embeds another whole report inside a band, run once for each row of the parent — one audition's items listed under each audition, for example.

You choose which report to embed and map the parent's values onto its parameters, so each copy runs for the right record.

Unlike everything else on the canvas, a sub-report has no fixed height: it is however many rows tall it needs to be. The designer shows it at the size you drew it as a placement guide, but the finished report lets it grow.

Seeing the result

Running a designed report opens it in the Report Viewer, where it is paginated, printable, and exportable.