Access 2007 intensely slow in report design

[anthony]

Access 2007 is becoming almost unusable because it takes so long to
design a report. You click on a control to move it, or whatever, and
you end up staring at the hour glass. I've seen some solutions such as
using a local default printer and turning off autocorrect, which I've
done. I also implemented http://support.microsoft.com/kb/275085 but
none of this has made any difference. This is on a brand new computer
with 3GB RAM. Does anyone have any ideas please?

 

[Allen Browne]

There's a wide range of things this could be, but you've already dealt with
some of the more obvious ones.

What is the source for this report? For example, if it is a crosstab query,
Access has to run the query to completion before it knows what the field
names are. It does have to know the field names in report design, and this
makes report design impossibly slow.

If that is the cause, you may be able to solve the problem by adapting the
PIVOT clause of the crosstab so that the field names are fixed. You need
this outcome anyway. Details:
http://allenbrowne.com/ser-67.html#ColHead

If that's not the case, are you actually in Design view?
Or are you in Layout view (where again the report has to actually retrieve
the data while designing)?

 

[anthony]

The reports are based on queries but not crosstab ones - just simple
ones that execute immediately. Also, this behaviour is not limited to
a single report; it seems to apply generally to all report design and
it is not specific to this particular computer either. Backend is held
on a network, front end on the local PC. Network response is what I
would expect from 100Mbs NICs. So either 1) it's something peculiar to
this particular database, 2) there's some common feature between PCs
(eg virus checker - Sophos) or 3) it's a "feature" of Access 2007. I'm
definitely in design view

 

[Allen Browne]

Okay, Anthony. That's not my experience of A2007.
IME, A2007 is a little slower than A2007, but not critically so.

You've probably read Tony's Performance FAQ for Access:
http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/performancefaq.htm

You've tried different printer drivers.

It would be worth temporarily turning off any other software that's running
(including your anti-virus), to see if that makes a difference.

Hopefully you have applied SP1:
http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=DC102486291033&Origin=HH102511011033&CTT=5

If this is a database that was converted from a previous version, a
compact/decompile/compact sequence would be worthwhile. In fact, I'd
probably run the sequence described here:
http://allenbrowne.com/recover.html

Particularly if this is a Core Duo machine, it should not be much slower
than A2003. I'm actually using A2007 most of the time these days, and it is
more than usable. When it first came out, there was a delay (perhaps 1/3
second) between setting properites and the screen showing where the focus
was. That was largely fixed by getting an updated nVidia driver. (This is in
Vista, where the nVidia drivers still have some problems.)

Not sure what else to suggest, except to reaffirm that it can run quite
well, so there is some issue to track down.

 

[anthony]

Sorry for the late reply. Thanks so much for the advice; I'm comforted
to learn that it's not usual for Access 2007 to be so slow. I did
wonder at one point whether it was related to the rich text nature of
some of my fields.

The database has its roots back in Access 2! BUT, I didn't convert it;
rather, I imported all the objects into a new accdb. Still, I'll
follow the advice in your post and see if matters improve. Many thanks