Printing a Form

[cshrum]

I have built a form with 4 tabbed pages...I have gone through all the threads about printing on here and checked for page size and issues similar with no fix found. My problem is the form looks great, but I need to be able to print it either in a PDF, or directly to a printer and the page is showing blank except for the header...any ideas?

The form works great on the computer, just cannot print.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Forms are not optimized for printing and printing forms with subforms, especially on separate tabs will not work at all.

You need to make a report with four subreports. You can add a button to the form to print a report for the visible record. Use the OpenReport method with a where argument that references the ID of the record displayed on the main form.

 

[isladogs]

As pat says, forms aren't optimised for printing.
However if you really do want to have a printed copy, you can just do a screengrab by clicking the PrtSc button for the whole screen or Alt+PrtSc for the active window ...

However you may get a few unwanted items appearing as well - see the top of the screenshot below

I use this method for doing screenshots for program documentation - it works for any form (including tabbed forms) or any other database object for that matter

 

[cshrum]

So the form is a new hire application. I need to be able to email the application to the HR person for review...I was hoping to put a button the applicant can click to "submit" that will send the document when they are finished filling out the form...will the report 'fix' work for this purpose? I'm afraid I've gotten in over my head.

 

[isladogs]

If you just want to send an email showing what the form contains, the approach I mentioned will work fine.

Obviously if you need to show all the tabs, you'd need to do several screenshots

Just save the screenshot image and include that in the body of an HTML email or do so as an attachment.

Otherwise, do what Pat said ... but is it really worth the effort.
A normal report can show you all the information from the form just as well

Another way might be to write a function that saves all the records to a text file then attach that to the email. Again ... is it really worth the effort?

 

[Pat Hartman]

@Colin, your suggestion will ONLY work IF all the subform records are visible. The subform will not grow or paginate when printed. There is no chance this will work for a form with tabs. Only the tab with the focus will print.

@cshrum, if your forms don't have colored backgrounds, you can easily convert them to reports by using the Save As option from the File menu. I'm not sure what will happen with the tab control since forms don't use it but at least most of the work would be done. You could then convert each of the subforms separately and add them manually to the report.

The final step is the command button to print. Choose the code option for the click event and use the DoCmd.OpenReport method. Intellisense will help you. Use the WHERE argument to pass in the ID of the current record.

 

[isladogs]

@Colin, your suggestion will ONLY work IF all the subform records are visible. The subform will not grow or paginate when printed. There is no chance this will work for a form with tabs. Only the tab with the focus will print.

Yes I agree.
As for the final point, that's why I wrote:

Obviously if you need to show all the tabs, you'd need to do several screenshots

Personally, I would just create a report that shows all the required information from the different tabs ... though I have used the exporting to a log file approach as well

 

[cshrum]

Thank you for the information...Access may not even be the best program for my form...I need to have it set up on 8 different computers where applicants can come in and open the application and send the information to the HR department without too much trouble. I'm working on changing the information over to a report...Hopefully I'll be able to make it work!

 

[Pat Hartman]

Access is fine for that purpose. Make sure the app is split into FE and BE and that each computer is running its own copy of the FE.