Help w/ Summary Reports in Access

[Jim Conrady]

Hello, folks,

I am fairly new to Access Reporting, so bear with me, please.

I have created 5 summary reports recently using the Reports Wizard in
Access. When first opened, they are somewhat ugly but after a few minutes of
tweaking am able to get them to look fairly decent.

One thing I have not been able to do is flatten out the footer area where
the sum(xx) values are located. I have gone into the properties, enabled
"shrink", tried to key in a new height, tried dragging in report design mode,
etc. I cannot get the summary lines to approach anything close to "single
spaced".

I tried moving the summary lines to the detail area, and that did not
help... they simply disappeared.

If someone could point me to any example or hints/tips page on how to
generate better looking summary reports, I would appreciate it. I tried
google and did not see anything germain to my issue.

Thanks in advance,

Regards,

Jim

 

[Clifford Bass]

Hi Jim,

It is rather unclear as to what is going on. It sounds like the
summary information is in a group footer. Is that the case? If there is
nothing in the detail section just close it up so it is of zero height. That
could be causing the extra spacing. Or, if there is stuff there and you do
not want it to display because you only want the summary information, try
making the entire section invisible.

Hope this helps,

Clifford Bass

 

[Jim Conrady]

Thanks for the response, Clifford.

You are correct: the summary information is in the group footer. I have
already removed the detail info... the problem I am running into is that I
cannot get the size of the footer to below .3375 inches, or there abouts. I
removed everything from the detail area and got that to zero. I reformatted
the group footer so that all the data is on one line, but I cannot squeeze
the height of that footer.

I did go into the properties section of the footer... there is a "can
shrink" property. I entered yes in it, and I still cannot get the footer
size any lower than that .3375 value...

A piece of data I left out of my original post: I am running Access 2003,
and my report was generated using the Access Reports Wizard (then modified by
me in the design view to remove redundant data and make it more presentable).

Help!

Jim

 

[Clifford Bass]

Hi Jim,

There must be something in the way even if it is not really "showing".
Drag your group footer section down to make it longer and starting below the
..3375 inch place, at the left- or right-most edge click and drag a selection
marquee over the entire area below your actual summary line. That should
bring to visibility anything there. Alternatively, up in the tool bar on
near the left side, you should see a combo box that lists all of the controls
on the form. Choose each on to see it selected. You probably will find
something that shows up in the footer section below the summary information,
possibly a very tiny text box or line. And a third alternative. Copy all of
the summary information from the footer. Go into the grouping and sorting
and delete the group footer. That should delete everything in it. Readd it
and paste the copied stuff back in.

Hope one of those helps.

Clifford Bass

 

[A deer in the digital media headlights!!]

Jim,

In the property shhet of any boxes (label, text,etc.) you have in the group
footer there are two things that need to be adjusted to make the group footer
smaller. Each box has a height adjustement that will allow the footer or
header to shrink only to that size and each box has a feature called padding.
If you look down in the property sheet of a text you will see top, bottom,
left and right padding. These amounts are the buffer or minimun distance the
text box will move next to another item. If you set the top and bottom to o
inches you can them eliminate this buffer. 0.0208" seems to be the default in
Access. Now go to the "Top" value in the property sheet and set the value to
0 inches. This will move you text box to the top of the footer. You will need
to do this for every box in the footer to allow the footer to become smaller.

Once you have doen that you can then reduce the size of your footer.



Evan

 

[Jim Conrady]

Evan, I think you are on to it, but I cannot find a "padding" value
anywhere... I looked at the properties for each box, and I looked at
properties for the group footer itself. I see margins (all of which are set
to zero), and I found the "top" attribute, but cannot find the padding...

I am using Access 2003... does that play into the conversation?

I can send you a screen shot of anything you want if that would help...

Thanks,

Jim