Is there any way to get around report size restrictions? (1 Viewer)

[catacaustic]

Hi all. I've just been handed a new project here and it's all involving Access (which I have had very little exposure to in the past).

The problem that I'm having is that the customer wants a new form put in as a "Bill Of Sale". Getting the values for this is no problem, but the bill of sale itself is around 12 pages long in Word, and I've run into the problem that Access will only let me make the actual report 1 to 1/12 pages of information before I hit the length limit on this.

If it was just tabular info that could keep on flowing I'd be fine, but there needs to be all the legal wording in there and it needs to be printed out in one go (the people that are working with the system are lucky to know how to turn a computer on, let alone print portions of something) so I'm stuck here wondering what to do?

I'm not sure that a report will do what I want, but if it won't, what other options should I look at?

 

[boblarson]

Why not set it up as a Mail Merge in Word and then you can set the appropriate fields to be in the appropriate places within Word and use Access as the data source to fill in the appropriate fields.

 

[catacaustic]

The Mail Merge is a good idea, and one that I thought of myself. But, there's still issues with that.

The main one is that each application can have multiple applicants, so each applicant needs to be listed on the one bill of sale document. To complicate matters even more, each applicant may or may not have the details of their spouse included as well, so these need to be filtered before being output as well.

I'm not sure that Mail Merge will allow me to get all of these values into a single "letter". From what I've seen it's available, and works for the detaisl of the item that's being financed, but when it comes to the applicants details, it all falls apart.

 

[Dreamweaver]

Sounds like you need to use automation with word maybe with bookmarks so you can fill the spaces as you need from the data in your db.

Mick

 

[catacaustic]

Yep, that would be good. But... I have got no idea of where to start even looking for that. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

[GaryPanic]

as an alternative
have your first two pages of the report then insert
sub reports for pages 3-4, 5-6,7-8 ect

may not work - but a littel bit of laterial thinking
gbp

 

[catacaustic]

I've tried the sub-pages, but they have the same problem with not letting the length of the entire report go over the maximum length of 22", so no matter what I try and throw in there or how, it always comes back to that hard limit. The sub pages also have other problems as far as consitant page numbering went. It's a great suggestion, but Access hasn't been made quite so "user friendly" to allow things like this it seems.

 

[Daveyk01]

I've tried the sub-pages, but they have the same problem with not letting the length of the entire report go over the maximum length of 22", so no matter what I try and throw in there or how, it always comes back to that hard limit. The sub pages also have other problems as far as consitant page numbering went. It's a great suggestion, but Access hasn't been made quite so "user friendly" to allow things like this it seems.

I am running in to this same limitation now. What did you ever do?

I am thinking of something like:

rptDataReportPages1_3
rptDataReportPages4_6
rptDataReportPages7_9

Now can the 1st report call the 2nd one and can the second one call the 3rd?
Will that print continously as far as the end user is concerned?

My data collection report may take 10 pages full of graphs, collected data etc., and wammo, I ran in to that 22" limit in Access 2000; that blows.

HALP.

 

[boblarson]

I hate to say it but if you are running into these limitations, I would suggest moving to Crystal Reports as it is a full-blown reporting tool and Access is not. Access has some decent reporting capabilities, but there is a point at which you might need a real dedicated reporting tool. I, personally, love Crystal Reports, but it really isn't user intuative, so you really need some training to get the most out of it.