Ms Office Tune Up

The Print Preview tab is a bit of an oddity, because it includes a few commands that don’t have anything to with printing your report. The commands in the Print Preview Data section let you take a snapshot of the current report data, and then export it into some other type of file so you can view it outside of Access or work with it in another program. This technique is a great one to use if you want to share some data with other people (read: impress the boss).

Although Access supports many different formats for exporting a report, you’ll use just a few with reports. (The others are more useful when you’re exporting pure data from a table or query, as explained in Chapter 10.) The useful formats for exporting reports include:

• Word. This option transforms your report into a document you can open in Microsoft Word. However, the format Access uses is a bit clumsy. (It separates each column with tabs and each line with a hard return, which makes it difficult to rearrange the data after the fact in Word.) A nicer export feature would put the report data into a Word table, which would make it far easier to work with.

• HTML Document. This option transforms your report into a rich HTML document, suitable for posting on the Web or just opening straight from your hard drive. The advantage of this format is that all you need to view it is a Web browser (and who doesn’t have one of those?). The only drawback is that the formatting, layout, and pagination of your report won’t be preserved exactly, which is a disadvantage if someone wants to print the exported report.

• Snapshot Viewer. This option creates a .snp snapshot file, which anyone can open to view and print the fully formatted report. In order to view the snapshot file, you need Microsoft’s free Snapshot Viewer program. (To download it, surf to http://office.microsoft.com and search for “Snapshot Viewer.”) Although the Snapshot Viewer works perfectly well, most people prefer to use the more standard PDF format (next in the list), which provides the same features. (Truthfully, the Snapshot Viewer is a bit of a holdover from earlier versions of Office.)

• PDF or XPS. This option lets you preserve your exact report formatting (so your report can be printed), and it lets people who don’t have Access (and possibly don’t even have Windows) view your report. The only disadvantage is that this feature isn’t included in the basic Access package. Instead, you need to install a free add-in to get it (you’ll see how in Section 8.2.3). For more information about the PDF and XPS formats, see the box “Learning to Love PDFs” below.

No matter which format you use, the process is essentially the same:

1. If you’re not already in Print Preview mode, right-click the report tab title, and then choose Print Preview.

2. Click one of the buttons in the Print Preview Data section of the ribbon, depending on the format you want to use for your export.

   For example, choose Print Preview Data Word to copy the results of your report into a Word-compatible document. Some of the options are stored under the Print Preview Data More menu, and you won’t see a PDF export option until you install the PDF add-in (as described in the next section).

3. Choose a name for the destination file (Figure 8-12).

   The destination file is the place where the exported data will be stored.

   
   Figure 8-12. Access assumes you want a name that matches your report (for example, ProductCatalog.rtf if the ProductCatalog report is exported to a rich text document that can be opened in Word). However, you can change the file name to whatever you want.

4. If you wish to open your exported file in the related program, check the setting “Open the destination file after the export operation is complete.”

   Say you’re exporting a Word document and you choose this option; Access will export the data, launch Word, and load up the document. This is a good way to make sure your export operation worked as expected. This option works only if you have the program you need on your computer.

5. Click OK to perform the export.

   Ignore the other two checkboxes, which are grayed out. They apply only to export operations that work with other database objects.

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   Note: Remember, exporting a report is like printing a report. Your exported file contains the data that existed at that moment in time. If you decide a week later that you need more recent data, you need to export your report again.
   

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6. Choose whether or not you want to save your export settings.

   By saving your export settings, you can quickly repeat your export operation later on. For example, if you export to a Word document and save the export settings, you can export the report data tomorrow, next week, or a year in the future.

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   Tip: You don’t need to open your report in order to export it. Instead, you can use all the commands you need straight from the navigation pane. Just right-click the report name, and then choose Export to show a menu of all your export options, from PDF files to HTML pages. You’ll also see a few options that don’t appear in the Export tab of the ribbon, including options for exporting the report to older, almost forgotten database and spreadsheet products like dBase, Paradox, and Lotus 1-2-3.
   

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