Microsoft Access Team Blog : Filter

Report View

Erik Rucker — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 12:35:00 GMT

The last regular post was on Sorting and Grouping in Reports, and that followed a post about Sort & Filter in Forms. This time, we'll go into the new Report View, which provides interactive reports at view time and so improves on the old Print Preview view, which was static. The goal of this feature is to make the report an interactive part of the application in a way you never could before.

Report view is simply a new view on reports and a sample report from our Issues tracking app looks like this:

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By example, the same report looks like this in Print Preview:

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You can see that the links on Cliff Jones and the Title field are gone in print preview, as they were formatted to show as links only on the screen through a new property. More on that later.

You've seen Layout View for Reports and Forms before.

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And finally the same report in Design View:

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Drill Through

The hyperlinks in the report above are actually not real links but are macro actions formatted to look like hyperlinks. To create the macro, you need to go to the Design View, and select the control, then set the Embedded Macro property. Embedded Macros are simply Access macros that are attached to the control, which makes it easier to move them around or update the document. In this example (and in the tracking apps) the macro is attached to the On Click event. You enter the macro editor by clicking on the builder at the right side of the edit next to the On Click event.

The macro is quite simple, just pulling up the relevant form and passing in the record ID. Here's the macro editor for the first line of the macro:

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The second step ("Not IsNull") is the interesting one with the properties that determine which report to show for which record:

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Display as Hyperlink

There is a new property called "Display as Hyperlink" that allows you to format the columns you put macros behind to look like links, so users know they can drill through them. Again, this is set through a property on the control from the Design View.

You can select to display only actual hyperlinks as a link (this is the legacy behavior and the default for the property). Alternately you can force non-hyperlinks to show as hyperlinks either all the time (both screen and print) or for the screen only. Formatting for the screen only allows you to show users what can be drilled through without having the hyperlink formatting appear on the printed reports.

Filter and Find

In addition to the drill-through functionality illustrated above, users can filter and use Find functions on reports in Report View as well. Filters work just like they did in the Layout View. As we saw before, the quickest way to apply a filter is right-click on the column. Like in Layout View, we support a rich set of date filters:

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Users can also apply filters from the Filter button on the ribbon:

And again, the filter is applied to whichever column is selected in the report. In this case, the user has selected a the status column and gets standard text filter functionality, with the ability to choose from the existing values or to click on "Text Filters" and create filters with clauses like Contains, Not Contains, and so on.

Find simply launches the standard Find dialog, and allows the user to search for text in the report.

Next Time

The next post will be on AutoFormats in Access 2007, which have been updated in a big way. There is a range of much more subtle and more contemporary formats to choose from to quickly give your applications a polished look and feel. In addition, now's the time to start running through all the SharePoint functionality, so I'm working up a post on that as well. One of the Access PM's is back at TechEd showing Access 2007 features and covering working with SharePoint in detail. If you're at TechEd, I'd recommend Suraj's session. If not, I'll try to post a link to the video if I can find one.

Filtering the Navigation Pane

Erik Rucker — Fri, 19 May 2006 12:43:00 GMT

In an earlier post, I showed the Navigation Pane, which shows all of the objects in the current database. The Nav Pane works great, is easy to expand and collapse sections, and so on, but the list can still get long enough to be hard to find things quickly. So, we've added the ability to filter it. Here's how it works.

First, the filtering UI is turned off by default (since it takes up space and is only useful for some large databases). If you'd like to use it, go to the Navigation Options dialog by right-clicking in the header of the pane and selecting "Navigation Options":

Then turn on "Show Search Bar".

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This inserts a filter control at the top of the Nav Pane:

Typing in the control essentially does a *.* contains filter and filters the contents of the pane as you type:

Quick, simple, and super useful! OK, that really is the last post before I disappear for a week...

Sort, Filter, and Group in Reports

Erik Rucker — Fri, 19 May 2006 12:26:00 GMT

Last week we looked at sorting and filtering in forms. This week we'll look at sort, filter, and group in reports and see the new tools we've got to make building reports quicker and easier. The next post will look at the new interactive reports (instead of print preview, there's now a "report view") and how sorting and filtering work there. There will be a week off next week while I'm out of town on vacation, so this will be at the end of the month.

Grouping and Sorting in Reports

Access has always supported grouping in reports, but has new tools to make this easier in Access 2007 (that's the real name, and I need to wean myself off of "Access12"). The quickest way to create a group in a report is to simply right click in the column you want to group and select "Group on {column name}" from the context menu. In the example below we're grouping on the Assigned to column:

This creates the grouping level, and opens the "Group, Sort, and Total" pane to allow you to edit the group. Sorting behaves in just the same way, and the same controls are present. In fact you can turn a Group into a Sort by simply turning off the header and footer rows for the Group. Since they're so similar, I've just shown grouping in this example. You can click on the image below to see the report grouped:

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You can also manually open the grouping pane from the ribbon by clicking in the contextual ribbon for Report Tools / Formatting:

When the group is created, you can edit its structure by clicking on the entry in the grouping pane and editing its settings. These settings are displayed in a natural language string with controls to edit appropriate portions, much like the Outlook rules wizard.

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You can use the grouping pane to add another grouping level or to sort by another column as well. You simply click on "Add a Group" or "Add a Sort" buttons and then select which field to use. Of course, you can right click and use the context menu as described above as well.

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The new group is added to the report and again, the new line in the pane is completely editable.

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Groups can be moved by simply dragging and dropping its line in the pane, so it is simple to change a report or to use one report to create another with different sorting and grouping.

After the group's line is moved, the report is updated to match the order of the pane:

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Filtering Reports

We discussed Filtering in the last post, and the same tools apply to reports, so I won't go into them here:

Report Totals and Summary Reports

It is simple to apply totals to a group as well, and this can either be done from the pane or from the ribbon. For number fields you can select from a set of numerical operations, for other fields you can count either the total number of rows or the number of non-null rows.

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Applying totals adds a new footer row to each group, and shows the results of the operation in that row:

Creating summary reports is as easy as building the report you'd like and then selecting "Hide Details" from the ribbon.

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I'll try to sneak in a small post on filtering the Navigation Pane before I leave town, but the next regular post will be in 2 weeks and will cover the new Report View, which provides interactive reports with Sort, Filter, and Drill Through functionality online.

Sorting and Filtering in Forms

Erik Rucker — Thu, 11 May 2006 15:53:00 GMT

One of the key things databases provide is the ability to sort, filter, and group data. Of course Access provides this today but Access 2007 makes it quicker and easier to sort, filter, and group data in forms, reports, and tables. Today we'll look at just filtering and basic sorting in a form datasheet - in this case we'll use the Issue List form from the Issue tracking application. In addition we're only looking at the top-level UI for sort and filter. Next post I'll go through the new grouping and sorting functionality, and we'll take a look at that in reports. There's a ton of functionality here, and substantial changes to the UI, so it'll take a couple of posts to get through it.

Quick Sorting and Filtering

We're using the Issue List form from the Issues tracking application. This is a split form, with a datasheet below and some buttons above providing navigation and other functionality. You can see the form below:

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You'll notice that next to column name for each column, there's a small arrow pointing down. Clicking this arrow opens the simple sort / filter menu:

In this dialog, you can sort by simply clicking the Ascending or Descending buttons. Filtering for text strings is as simple as clicking the appropriate boxes at the bottom of the form. This menu is sort of a combination menu / dialog. If you click the Sort buttons it dismisses immediately like a menu, but if you start checking the checkboxes it behaves like a menu and you click the OK / Cancel buttons. It makes more sense to use than to talk about!

Text Filters

Above the checkboxes, there is an item for "Text Filters". Clicking this brings up functionality to set text-aware filters, with the ability to choose from a number of conditions. The choices are:

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Choosing a condition brings up the following dialog with the appropriate condition. This is the example for "Equals":

Date Filters

Since Access understands dates as a data type, we can provide date-aware filtering, so if the user has selected a date column, we can provide appropriate filters for dates:

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Of course the same sorting and filtering functionality is available directly on the ribbon:

As is filtering:

Clicking the Filter button brings up the same filter menu shown above.

Selection-Aware Filtering

All of the filtering commands above take the column as the selection and understand the data in the column as a whole. If the user has a row selection in a column, we can provide special filters for that row. For example, in the screenshot below the user has right-clicked on "Cliff Jones" and in addition to the regular text filters, she can select to filter for Cliff with one click.

If the user has a selection in a row, the same filtering is available from the ribbon as well as the right-click menu.

Advanced Filters

All of Access's existing rich filtering functionality is still available on the Advanced filtering drop-down.

Users can filter by form, setting up the form with one click:

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The user then selects filter criteria in the form, and applies the filter by clicking the "Toggle Filter" button on the ribbon:

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And the results are displayed in the original form:

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Notice in the image above that the "Assigned To" and "Priority" columns have filter icons next to them, to indicate that they have an applied filter.

To remove the filter, the user simply clicks on Toggle Filter on the ribbon again:

Advanced Filter

And the existing Query By Example filter UI is still available as well. The user simply selects "Advanced Filter/Sort..." from the dropdown and is taken to the query builder to begin constructing a rich query.

Next post, I'll go into the new Sorting and Grouping UI for reports, and we'll take a quick look at how the Filtering functionality above transports to reports.

Microsoft Access Team Blog : Filter

Report View

Drill Through

Display as Hyperlink

Filter and Find

Next Time

Filtering the Navigation Pane

Sort, Filter, and Group in Reports

Grouping and Sorting in Reports

Filtering Reports

Report Totals and Summary Reports

Next Post

Sorting and Filtering in Forms

Quick Sorting and Filtering

Text Filters

Date Filters

Selection-Aware Filtering

Advanced Filters

Advanced Filter

Next Post