Report with fixed layout?

[MikeGreen]

Hi all
I am sure that I have seen this before but as I stated on my last thread it has been a few years since I last used access in real anger and the grey cells are not what they used to be.
Okay I have a database that a friend uses to populate the passengers onto his coach. There is a report that prints out seat labels with the seat number and passenger name.
He has asked if the labels can print out in a templated order (the layout and seat numbers of the actual coach) so that the seats that do not have passengers allocated show as blank and the populated seats show the allocated passenger name.
I believe that I have to add a table that shows the total number of seats to represent the coach layout but I am stuck on how I populate the passengers names?
I am thinking that I create a query that used the layout table and seat allocation query and then print a report based on that output? Or is there a cleaner/better way that anyone can suggest? I am open to ideas please or is there an example of this sort of thing that anyone can point me at please?
Thanks in advance

 

[gemma-the-husky]

I would have a table with say 100 rows, and columns

SEATNO, SEATNAME

manually enter seats 1 to 100 in the first column.

use an update query to clear the second column. now you can enter names into the seatname column.

you can have a query to select seats 1 to whatever, and print these out.
you could probably make this a four column report, say, so that for 80 seat coach you would get 4 columns of 20 seats.

you could even painstakingly add text boxes to a report to lay out the coach floor plan, rather than use a normal access report. Is that what you have done/were thinking of?

does this work?

 

[MikeGreen]

Dave
Thanks for the reply. Yes I was thinking of the table option but I quite like your idea on creating the floor plan using text boxes but do you know of an example of how the text boxes would be populated with the correct passenger? There script would have to allow for double seats where there is a single passenger and which passenger had the window seat etc. Any ideas or examples where this sort of thing has been done before would help, but thanks again.