Export Access rpt as text, inserts blank lines. Why?

[Guest]

I have an access report with one textbox in the detail section. When I view
the report within Access it looks fine. When I export to a text file a blank
line is inserted after EVERY 3rd line.

 

[Marshall Barton]

I have an access report with one textbox in the detail section. When I view
the report within Access it looks fine. When I export to a text file a blank
line is inserted after EVERY 3rd line.

An Access report is a graphical display. It does not
translate to line printers or text files unless you can
somehow manage to make the report sync up exactly to the
restricted format, which in general is a hopeless exercise.

For a simple text file, it is far, far easier to just export
a query. For more complex file formats, it is best to use a
VBA procedure with the File I/O statements, Open, Write,
etc.

If you must pursue the report route, try eliminating any
blank space above and below the text box and remove any
report/page headers/footers. If that doesn't work, and it
probably won't, then try adjusting the font, font size and
text box height to see if you can zero in on some
combination that comes close.

 

[SA]

In addition to Marsh's suggestions, use a fixed width (non-true type) font
for your report this will help get the spacing of controls set properly.

 

[Chuck]

An Access report is a graphical display. It does not
translate to line printers or text files unless you can
somehow manage to make the report sync up exactly to the
restricted format, which in general is a hopeless exercise.

You're never going to the line spacing exact, except for a very short report.
The problem is that you can only adjust the Access report line height to the
closest 0.0007 inches. That looks pretty small, but after a while the
diierence in the Access and the MS Word line spacing adds up to give you a
blank line. If you can edit the text file in MS Word, write a macro that
deletes the third line and repeats itself to the end of the report. After the
macro is written, it's quite fast. The only saving feature is that however
many lines there are between blank lines, it will be consistent.

Just a wizard prodder
Chuck
--

 

[Guest]

Thanks to you all. I will try exporting the query as this is a very simple
report.

 

[Guest]

One thing that worked for me was to export to an rtf file then save that file
as a text file.

 

[Chuck]

An Access report is a graphical display. It does not
translate to line printers or text files unless you can
somehow manage to make the report sync up exactly to the
restricted format, which in general is a hopeless exercise.

For a simple text file, it is far, far easier to just export
a query. For more complex file formats, it is best to use a
VBA procedure with the File I/O statements, Open, Write,
etc.

If you must pursue the report route, try eliminating any
blank space above and below the text box and remove any
report/page headers/footers. If that doesn't work, and it
probably won't, then try adjusting the font, font size and
text box height to see if you can zero in on some
combination that comes close.

I don't write code, so my solution was to write a macro in the text editor
program to delete every 3rd line. However, you must be absolutely sure that
the blank line occurs exactly at ever 3rd line for the entire length of the
report. If you can write code, you can probably look for the blank lines
wherever they occur and delete them.

Just a wizard prodder
Chuck
--