Transfering Report Data

[Sonny Jim]

I have a client who needs to do more than E-mail an rtf copy of his Access reports to his clients. I Understand that a lot depends on what the client receiving the report has to work with, but generally speaking, what are some common and/or best approaches to the data transfer of reports using just Access. Also, where can I read up more on this?

 

[Sonny Jim]

That does provide a good replication of the report, and I assume without the need for MS Office, but I am really looking for a way to send this in a way that it can be integrated into another database or spreadsheet. Any other ideas?

 

[Sonny Jim]

I am trying to prepare the reports for exporting into Excel but I find that this functionality been omitted from Access 2007 and probably for a good reason. Using older Access versions I can export data into Excel but it involves a lot of work for the operator. This is because exporting directly into Excel often times results in lost fields, leading zero's being dropped from zips, currency notation being dropped, numbers in text fields being changed to exponential scientific notation, ...etc. This is compounded by the fact that field labels are re-created from the field names of the data being transferred, for example: "AmtPaid Grand Total Sum". One can take the extra step to export 1st into MS Word and then into Excel but there are sometimes format issues such as columns not lining up. If a user needs to export several reports, some directly into Excel, other into Word first, then into Excel, it quickly becomes quite a chore.

However, the Microsoft Access Adviser Guide article you mentioned sounds very interesting. Can I access this online and if so could you give me a link?

 

[Sonny Jim]

I'll have to look into subscribing, that article does sound very interesting. On the other hand, I'm sure I could put together some Excel macro routines to fix the small problems with each report, however it would take a little time to do this and could get messy if the wrong report was pasted into the wrong workbook or worksheet. Nonetheless, it is an option and also a way of keeping the burden off the user.