Duplex printing two up

[Old man]

I am working on a program to print bills. I designed a report with two
pages, the customer address on page one and the billing info on page two. I
then print it auto duplex in landscape and it works correctly. We then fold
it in half to be mailed like a postcard and the bill is hidden inside. Life
is good, except for one small problem. I need to print them two-up, because
our printer will only auto duplex a full page, and we do not want to waist
half of every sheet of stock. We need two addresses on the front with two
bills on the back. We will then cut them into two bills and fold and mail
them. If I try to set it up with two columns, and set if for down then
across, it prints the address and the bill on the front, and the next record
the same way on the back. If I make it across then down, the second column
is blank on every page.

Manual duplex is not an option, because there is too much risk of getting
out of sync and sending someone another person’s bill. Can this be done?

 

[AG]

The obvious solution would be to use paper of the correct size instead of
cutting the pages in half.
I take it that is not on option.

I am sure that there are other ways, but here is an idea that might work.
I am guessing that the data for each bill is one record in your report's
recordsource and that you are forcing a new page after the section of the
report with the address info and then another for the next record.

Create a temp table with all the fields that are in your report source, plus
two additional fields.
PageNum(long), PageNum1(long).
Dump the data for the report into the temp table.
Open a recordset of the temp table using the same sort that the report will
use.
Go through the recordset and populate the three extra fields as follows:
For every odd record, number PageNum sequentially and leave PageNum1 null.
For every even record, number PageNum1 with the value of PageNum from the
previious record and leave PageNum null.

Then create a query using two instances of the temp table joining PageNum on
PageNum1 and include all fields from both instances.

This gives you a query with data from two (original) records in a single
record as two sets of fields.

Use this query as the source for your report.
You can then layout your report using the first set of fields where the
first address/bill data should be and the second set of fields where the
second address/bill data should be.

Hope this helps.

 

[Larry Linson]

A. G.'s suggestion is a good one, if your printer will duplex the
half-sheets; after all, you are going to the effort to cut the sheets
anyway, so you could cut them before printing. But just as an idle question,
is it actually cost-effective to use the larger sheet, and pay for a
person's time to cut the bills apart instead of using a full sheet?

Paper's generally not all that expensive comparted to the cost of labor.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Office Access