Ms Office Tune Up

If you haven’t thought much about importing and exporting, it’s probably because you don’t need to use these featuresyet. Many databases are completely happy living a quiet, solitary life. However, importing and exporting might come in handy for a few reasons. Sooner or later, one of these reasons will apply to you.

Understanding Exports

Exporting is the easier part of the equation. Exporting’s simpler than importing, because it involves moving information from a stricter storage location (the data-base) to one with fewer rules (another type of document).

Here are some of the most common reasons people decide to export information:

• You want to email some information to a friend. You don’t want to send the Access database because your friend doesn’t have a copy Access, or you want him to see only some not all of the data.

• You’re creating a presentation in PowerPoint. The easiest way to dazzle and convince your peers is to show them some impressive information from your database.

• You want to analyze the information in Excel. Access is great for storing and managing your data, but it doesn’t give you the tools to help you figure out what it all means. If you want to crunch the numbers with heavy duty formulas and slick charting features, it makes sense to move it to Excel.

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Based on the limited page layout options, you might assume that there’s not much you can do customize a printout. However, you actually have more control than you realize. Many of the formatting options that you’ve learned about in this chapter also have an effect on your printout. By applying the right formatting, you can create a better printout.

Here are some pro printing tips that explain how different formatting choices influence your printouts:

• Font. Printouts use your datasheet font and font size. Scale this down, and you can fit more in less space.

• Column order and column hiding. Reorder your columns before printing out to suit what you want to see on the page. Even better, use column hiding (Section 3.1.4) to conceal fields that aren’t important.

• Column widths and row height. Access uses the exact widths and heights that you’ve set on your datasheet. Squeeze some columns down to fit more, and expand rows if you have fields with large amounts of text and you want them to wrap over multiple lines.

• Frozen columns. If a table’s too wide to fit on your printout, then the frozen column is printed on each part. For example, if you freeze the FirstName field, you’ll see it on every separate page, so you don’t need to line the pages up to find up who’s who.

• Sort options. They help you breeze through data in a datasheetand they can do the same for a printout. Apply them before printing.

• Filter options. These are the unsung heroes of Access printing. Use them to get just the important rows. That way, your printout has exactly what you need.

The only challenge you face when using these settings is the fact that you can’t set them from the print preview window. Instead, you have to set them in the datasheet, jump to the print preview window to see the result, jump back to the datasheet to change them a little bit more, jump back to the print preview window, and so on. This process can quickly get tiring.

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Earlier in this chapter, I showed you how to get Word to automatically prompt you for document properties because saving metadata is a good idea for most documents. However, it’s not such a good idea if you are sharing a document with other people, particularly peo­ple outside of your organization. That’s because the metadata might contain private or sen­sitive data that you probably don’t want outsiders to see. This also applies to other document data, such as reviewers’ comments and annotations.

Removing this kind of data by hand is not only time-consuming, but it’s also easy to miss a thing or two. To help out, Word (and the other main Office 2007 programs) comes with a Document Inspector that can search for potentially private data and remove it from the document automatically. The Document Inspector can remove the following document data:

• Document properties
• Headers, footers, watermarks, and hidden text
• Personal information, such as your username and your personal summary information
• Document versions
• Reviewer comments and annotations
• Custom XML data

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