Should I create a Form or a Report?

[mcomp72]

Hi everyone. I've very new to Access, and am about to start building my database. It will be for storing employee information, to generate employment paperwork. I work in the film/TV business, so crew people have to fill out paperwork every time they work on a new production with me. The purpose of my database will be to fill in their information automatically onto the various documents each time they start work on a new production, and then create PDF's of them.

I will be recreating these needed documents in the database. For instance, a W-2 form and an I-9 form (among others). My question is: should I create these documents as Forms or Reports? I will only want one record to show up on one of these documents at a time, of course, so it seems like a Report might not be the way to go... but I'm really not sure, since I won't need to input any information onto the documents directly. (All of the information will be input through another Form I'll be creating.)



I appreciate any advice you can offer.

[June7]

Forms are intended for screen display. Reports are intended for output to printer. Each can be made to function somewhat like the other but not ideally. Can't do data entry through a report but a report can be displayed to screen. A form can be printed but getting data to fit paper constraints can be tricky.

A filter can be applied to report to show only one record. Or records can be output to separate report pages. And if you want to output only one record even a form would have to be filtered.

Recommend you use reports for output.

However, if you need an accounting/payroll type database, recommend you consider OTS program such as QuickBooks.

[mcomp72]

Thanks very much for the clarification on Forms vs. Reports! Sounds like Reports is the way to go for me.