Adding images to Reports

[CritterLes]

I am trying to create a report that has one page per record. On the page there should be an image/logo. The Logo will change based on the value of a certain field.
I also need a page break after each record so the forms can be handed out to different people. I'm using Access 2013. Is what I described possible using Access Reporting. Would anyone suggest a different approach?

 

[sneuberg]

That approach sounds ok. I just suggest keeping your images out of the database if there are going to be a lot of them. Access has a 2 gigabyte limit and you can get there pretty fast with images.

In your table you create a text field for the path of the image file. You bind the field to a textbox in the report. You can hide this textbox. Then you make the control source of the image control that textbox. That's all you need to do in Access 2013.

 

[Simon_MT]

I would use external referencing of images. There is nothing to stop you embedding images but we are developing databases not housing blobs (binary large objects).

Simon

 

[CritterLes]

Thanks for the suggestions. I have looked up External Referencing, is this an option in the Access Ribbon or is this code that needs to be created. I am only using 2 images and they are not that large. I work with habitat for Humanity and I am trying to create a Donation Receipt. We have 2 types of receipt and our drivers will give this to donors based on the pickup.
The receipt will be; If field 1s value equals "S' then print this image and these lines, else print a different value and these lines.
Would this be easier to accomplish in Access or Excel?
The source file will be CSV and I will have to load it.Thanks for the suggestions. I have looked up External Referencing, is this an option in the Access Ribbon or is this code that needs to be created. I am only using 2 images and they are not that large. I work with habitat for Humanity and I am trying to create a Donation Receipt. We have 2 types of receipt and our drivers will give this to donors based on the pickup.
The receipt will be; If field 1s value equals "S' then print this image and these lines, else print a different value and these lines.
Would this be easier to accomplish in Access or Excel?
The source file will be CSV and I will have to load it. I also have access to both 2013 and 2016, is one better than the other?

 

[Minty]

If it is only two logos then you can probably get away with simply embedding them.
The external linking does require some basic VBA code, but is the more robust method particularly if you might change anything in the future, your report (Receipt) will need a little bit of code anyway - it just depends how much you want to learn / accomplish.

 

[sneuberg]

If it is only two logos then you can probably get away with simply embedding them..

Could you expand on that? I'd like to know how. We needed to do something similar. We had a report whose banner image would depend on a company name. There were only three so we really didn't want to keep them in external files where they might be deleted but we couldn't find anyway to do it baring having three separate reports.

Our fears that the image files would be delete were realized. I find it amazing that users would delete files in a folder named Required Files but they did. To avoid this missing banners problem in the next version we stored the image files in blob fields and exported them if they were deleted. It would have been nice if we could have avoided having to do that.

 

[Minty]

@Sneuberg - As you mentioned If it's only ever going to be two images just embed them in the report, I didn't use two reports, from memory I simply made the correct image visible or not based on the other fields.

 

[sneuberg]

@Minty Thanks. Now I can't remember why we didn't do that but this sounds like a good solution for the OP.

I thought of another possibility which would be to put the image in an OLE object in a subreport set up to display one record. So there would be a table of the OLE images that would be the record source of the subreport. To change the image on the report you would filter the record source of the subreport to display the appropriate image. Unfortunately I've been unable to test this idea as my system has stopped display images (even bitmap images) in OLE fields.

 

[Simon_MT]

An OLE image has previously represented a bitmap image, aka Objects as Large as Elephants. I have no idea why this format was chosen it is simply bloatware. Over 25,000 images @ 1000KB breaks Access. I know that there are only two images but it is inefficient to store blobs in a database.

Simon

 

[sneuberg]

An OLE image has previously represented a bitmap image, aka Objects as Large as Elephants. I have no idea why this format was chosen it is simply bloatware. Over 25,000 images @ 1000KB breaks Access. I know that there are only two images but it is inefficient to store blobs in a database.

Simon

Last time I played with it, it seemed that images didn't require a lot of overhead. PDFs are the real space eaters. There's 5 MB of something Access tacks on the PDF no matter how small or simple the PDF.

 

[Simon_MT]

I have playing cards to teach bridge.

Heart King

jpg 127kb
png 274kb
bmp 1024kb

Most of the image is white so why map every pixel when jpg can deal with the white in blocks.

Simon

 

[Frothingslosh]

I've attached one method to do that. You'll need to make use of the Attachment data type they introduced with 2007.