Ms Office Tune Up

AutoFormats are a great way to get a bunch of formatting done in a hurry. However, sometimes you want to use more of a personal touch and format the different parts of your report by hand.

To apply more targeted formatting, you need to follow a two-step approach. First, select the portion of the report you want to format. Second, click a command in the Report Layout Tools | Formatting Font section of the ribbon (Figure 8-15).

Figure 8-15. The Report Layout Tools | Formatting Font section is packed with basic formatting tools.

The Layout Tools | Formatting Font section lets you adjust all the following details:

• The font and font size (11-point Calibri is the easy-on-the-eyes standard)

• The text alignment (left, right, or center)

• The text color and background color

Although you can format the title, date, or page number sections of the report, you’ll spend most of your time formatting the column headers and the column values. To format a column header, click it. To format the column values, click any one of the values in the column. Figure 8-16 shows an example.

You can’t format the individual values in a column. That means that you can format the ProductName column to look different from the Price column, but you can’t format Chocolate Jasmine Tea differently from Prince’s Peppermint Patties. This limitation makes senseafter all, you could have thousands of records, and keeping track of the formatting of each one would be way too much work for Access.

Figure 8-16. Here, the ProductName column is singled out for special formatting. Although it looks like only a single value is selected, Access will apply formatting changes to the entire column.

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