MS Access Reporting - can it be pretty?

Question

I am working on a project converting a "spreadsheet application" to a database solution. A macro was written that takes screen shots of each page and pastes them into a PowerPoint presentation. Because of the nice formatting options in Excel, the presentation looks very pretty.

The problem I'm having is that I haven't ever seen an Access report that would be pretty enough to display to upper management. I think the output still has to be a PowerPoint presentation. It needs to look as close as possible to the original output.

I am currently trying to write some code to use a .pot (presentation template) and fill in the data programmatically. Putting the data into a PowerPoint table has been tricky because the tables are not easy to manipulate. For example, if a particular description is too long, I need to break into the next cell down (word-wrap isn't allowed because I can only have n lines per page).

Is there a way to make an Access report pretty, am I headed down the right path, or should I just try to programmatically fill in the Excel spreadsheet and use the code that already exists there to produce the presentation? (I'd still need to figure out how to know when to break a line when using a non-monospaced font, as the users are currently doing that manually when they enter the data in the spreadsheet)

Jason Z: If I set it to wrap, and I already have n lines, it would make n+1 or 2 lines on the slide, which is unacceptable.

Dennis: That article looks very good, I should be able to glean something from it. Thanks!

Answer 1

I have implemented Access reports which were 'pretty' enough. The downside is that it takes a lot of time and effort, and trial and error to produce the desired output.

You can definitely get there, but it requires the patience of a saint.

Answer 2

I personally would not try to re-invent the wheel here. If you already have an Excel sheet that has the formatting you want, just export the data from Access into Excel for the report. Now, if you didn't have the original Excel sheet to begin with, that would be a completely different story.

As for breaking lines with non-monospaced fonts, have you tried setting the cell format to wrap?

Answer 3

I guess it depends on what you mean by pretty. For example, I do not find it particularly difficult to produce say, reasonable graphs and tables with alternate line shading in Access. It is also possible to use MS Word and fill in bookmarks, or mail merge. If the present system uses VBA to create the PowerPoint presentation, perhaps much of it could be transferred to Access? Microsoft have an article on Access to Powerpoint: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa159920(office.11).aspx

Finally, it is not impossible to build HTML output from Access.

Answer 4

Joel, (your co-host here) did a thing about using access reports for shipping labels a few years back... maybe this could be a inspriation for you?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HowToShipAnything.html

Answer 5

It sounds like the path of least resistance is to fill in the Excel spreadsheet. We have a contractor who does our Access stuff, and for the more complicated reports he uses Excel. I guess complicated == hard to make look good.

Answer 6

Rather than filling in the excel spreadsheet programmatically, you may want to use the external data features of Excel and Access. Generally I put a query on each tab, which of course may be hidden. An "update all" causes all the queries to be updated. Then summary tabs show the pretty results from all the individual queries.

For one particularly complex system, a bit of excel vba programmatically changed a query and then walked through the tabs updating each one.

Finally, rather than doing screen shots, Excel has a "copy cells as a image" copy that populates the copy buffer with a resizeable image. This could give you better looking results than a pure screenshot since a screenshot can have various deficiencies depending on pixel density.

Answer 7

I would suggest that the problem you're having is because the requirement to replicate the old method identically is an incredibly bad idea.

You're not using Excel any more.

You're using a different tool with different capabilities.

Thus, you will use different methods to get results.

Re-evaluate the original requirements to see if they still make sense (e.g., exactly why is PowerPoint involved at all? Can PowerPoint import from the Access report snapshot viewer? Can PowerPoint import from a PDF produced from an Access report?), or if they are too connected to the old tools, and then determine what is important and what isn't, and only then should you start designing your solution.

--
David W. Fenton
http://dfenton.com/DFA/

Answer 8

Access has the capability to create downright beautiful reports. The problem is that it can't make a spreadsheet look better than Excel. You have to know when to use each tool.

Use Excel when you have spreadsheet-like formatting, need a lot of boxes and lines, or want to draw charts.

Use Access when you will output a report as a PDF. It's very useful for one-record-per-page detail reports, formatting where you need to position things very precisely, and where you need to embed subreports with related or unrelated data.

Think about the reports that would be nasty in Excel because you'd have to merge cells all over the place and do funny things with the placement and the layout would never work. That's where Access shines.

Answer 9

Just an update: After a few hours of work, I was able to get a nice report out of Access (almost an exact copy of the excel version). It wasn't as difficult as I thought, I just had to figure the correct mixture of out subreports and pagebreaks.

Working with the wordwrap features of Excel/Powerpoint were a dead end because there could only be a set number of lines per page, period; plus I was too lazy to nail down all the pagination with VBA code issues myself. Like Shelley says, Access shines at report generation.

The output ended up being a PDF (Using Adobe Acrobat Professional). The problem I have left is getting select pages of said PDF into Powerpoint without Powerpoint antialiasing the results for me and making the resulting slide's text fuzzy. I found a couple of articles on converting .snp output to .wmf, which sounds like the way to go on that front.

Answer 10

We create multi-colored, conditionally formated, reports that are printed for the partner meeting each month of a publically traded corporation. They're real pretty.