In the previous post, we gave many examples of how Access can really help you create a database fast and with ease. We mentioned data validation, querying, reporting, and viewing data in Excel as areas where Access is rapid and flexible. In this post I will focus on reporting.

The last post mentioned the ability to create reports, order information, and create totals with an Access report. Below I will give a brief example showing how simply, fast, and cleanly you can do this with Access.

For this, I've pretended to be a working parent, Margaret, who is tracking her cookie orders for her son's school class project. Margaret created a Cookies table ("Product Information") and Requests table ("Invoices") and a query combining the two. She then makes a quick-create report based on the query.

 Orders report in Layout View

Margaret has multiple orders from her coworkers for sugar cookies and mint chocolate cookies, so she wants to group the orders by cookie type and see the number of each cookie she needs to fill her orders. For this she clicks the Group & Sort button. 

 Group & Sort button on the Design tab

This brings up Grouping and Sorting options at the bottom of her report.

Group, Sort, and Total pane

 After she selects to Group by "Cookie" and does a few quick drags, her form looks like the following:

 Orders report in Layout View

Her orders are few now.  But when she gets more orders, she knows she doesn't want to have to sum more than 100 orders by hand. So she creates a quick total for her Qty field and positions it next to the rest of her stock. She selects the Qty field, and then clicks the Totals button next to Group & Sort.

 Adding a sum to the Orders report

And here's the finished product in Print Preview:

 The Orders report in Print Preview

 With a few clicks and two minutes, Margaret has a nice-looking report that will help her track the new orders she will get when she heads to work tomorrow. And by going to the Print Preview, she has a high-fidelity printable report to show to the other involved parents.

This example shows how quickly a nice-looking report with grouping and totals can be created in Access for those much larger data sets you may have. Of course, you need to manage and work with that data outside of reporting, and Access allows you to do numerous other tasks quickly and easily.

--Joshua Nogales