Looking for a good tutorial on creating reports

[S2000magician]

Having just joined here today, I'm 1 for 2: one thing I wanted to do is possible and I got great advice on how to do it, and the other's impossible (but at least I got advice that it's impossible so I wasn't wasting my time).



For my third foray, I'd like to find a good tutorial on creating reports. Most of the data I have originated in Excel (I know: you're shocked!), and the originators have the data in a layout they like, with various colored backgrounds in the cells and some cells filled in while others are blank and so on. If it's possible to create a report format in Access to (at least) approximate this, I'd love to know how, and I think that a nice video tutorial that covers this sort of stuff (along with headers and footers and such) would be just the ticket.

Do such videos exist? (I'd be amazed if they didn't.) Which would you recommend.

Thanks for all your help, everyone!

[CJ_London]

there are plenty out there although 'good' for one person is not necessarily 'good' for another. Recommend just google something like 'how to create access report' and explore a few links

colours and so on are certainly possible - excel has a conditional formatting option, so does access.

Just remember excel and access are completely different animals. Excel combines data and presentation into one view, access has data in tables and uses queries, forms and reports for presentation. Excel tends to store data 'wide and short' in one block (table) whilst access stores data 'narrow and tall' in multiple tables.

[Micron]

OK, dumb question time. If they are so in love with their current view, why try to migrate this to an Access report type of view (assuming you mean virtually identical replication)? I second Ajax's comments about the differences, so that's why the question. If there are no issues with the current setup, then "it ain't broke so why fix it?". It's quite possible that you will cause yourself grief by trying to make Access do Excel-like stuff - possible, but not something I'd advise for a novice. It would be a bad start to your learning curve.

[S2000magician]

If there are no issues with the current setup, then "it ain't broke so why fix it?".

At the moment, they have one analyst who is responsible for handling all of the portfolio stuff, and he does it mostly by hand. They're small enough that it's not a problem, but if they grow much more (and they anticipate doing so), it will soon be unmanageable. I'm trying to automate a lot of what he does, and simplify it at the same time. So it's fair to say that while there aren't any issues with the current setup, there likely will be in the near future if it remains unchanged.

By the way, while awaiting replies from y'all today, I started fiddling around with reports and managed to come up with something that's workable, if not ideal. In particular, I figured out how to customize the report title based on the data it's reporting (nothing earth shaking, but I felt pretty good about figuring out which event I needed to capture and wrote the VB code that did what I needed to do). I do appreciate the help that y'all offer here, and I'll doubtless be back with other questions. Probably lots of other questions.

Thanks!

[Micron]

Fair 'nuff. I'd advise that you learn and understand normalization if you don't already. That way you'll not only end up with a db that's more manageable for you but you'll be able to defend why something has to look a certain way when they want it the Excel way - because people don't like to change. Then there is also the possibility of controlling some of Excel functionality and layout from within Access.
Good luck!