Report to print color bars to 60 horizontal slots

[Guest]

I have this report which prints horizontal color bars in 60 slots which
represent months over a 5-year period.
I build the report in a temporary table which then feeds the report.
Currently I have columns called M1 thru M60 in this table.
My problem is that now the user also wants special characters in the slots
to represent certain events. These will overlay the color. So I am now facing
adding another 60 columns for this character.
That is unless anyone can think of a creative solution for cramming both a
color and a character in one byte. There will be a maximum of 10 different
colors and 8 different characters.
Any ideas?

 

[Duane Hookom]

We don't have a clue how you have set up your report to print "horizontal
color bars in 60 slots". There are no "bars" and "slots" in Access reports.
There are controls, sections, record sources, etc.

Did you use the sample calendar report from
http://www.access.hookom.net/Samples.htm?

 

[Guest]

Sorry if my terminology was vague or misleading, each report 'slot' is of
course a control and they abut each other. Each control has its source set to
the column M1 thru M60 in the table. A special character in the table column
is translated to the color (in the format event) for the control. I set the
background and foreground colors the same to make this character 'invisible'.
Of couse I can make the table columns more than one character and have the
color value and the character separated by something like a colon. But that
means I have to change the contents of the column for printing.

Dorian

 

[Duane Hookom]

If you are creating a timeline type report, consider looking at the sample
in the link I provided. You might not need to build a temporary table. I
expect your actual data tables are more normalized than M1 to M60 columns.