Label saver utility

Clint Covington — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 15:29:49 GMT

Peter's Software has recently released a free utility for printing labels. Here is how they describe it:

Label Saver is a freeware MS Access module that will allow your users to specify a label printing start position and a number of copies of each label to print. Using Label Saver means you don't have to throw out that half-used sheet of labels. Just continue printing from the next available label!

2007 templates have been updated

Clint Covington — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:53:41 GMT

Some of our customers have reported problems printing mailing labels on contacts, customers, employees tables in the 2007 templates. The contacts type Address field was defined as a Memo data type. Unfortunately, the report mailing label wizard filters our memo fields from the list of fields. This was a pain point with many users who couldn't figure out why the Address field didn't show up when using the report Label Wizard. Jeff Conrad even created a special FAQ page to explain to users why they couldn't see their Address field in the wizard dialog pages and how to change the data type back to Text.

We revised the 24 English online Access 2007 templates with this change (these templates also show up in the Getting Started Screen). Any table in any of the templates that used Memo as the data type for the Address field has now been changed to Text. The next time anyone downloads one of these templates, they shouldn't have problems printing labels.

If you have other suggestions for the templates--send us an email. We would love to hear from you.

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:

(Click image to enlarge)

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

(Click image to enlarge)

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.

(Click image to enlarge)

And finally the same report in Design View:

(Click image to enlarge)

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:

(Click image to enlarge)

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

(Click image to enlarge)

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:

(Click image to enlarge)

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.

Microsoft Access Team Blog : Printing

Label saver utility

2007 templates have been updated

Report View

Drill Through

Display as Hyperlink

Filter and Find

Next Time