Need Help With Layout and Getting Data on One Document (1 Viewer)

dynamictiger

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Every month I send a report to my customer showing chemical consumption. This has been a manual input in excel which is a bit of double entry as the data is actually in Access. I haven't been looking at this till now as it was on the old server and too hard etc in 2003 to do as much as I can now.

However now I have it in Access I can do cross tab to give a better looking output and in 2016 I can export this easily to various formats this is good enough for now. However …

I can now do the next level of data crunching and get comparative month on month consumption and averages and so on. Great. But how do I lay this out to be easily understood, transparent and as the data is all in cross tabs into a report? I have never put a cross tab query into a report either, so probably need some pointers here. But its really the layout so it isn't a bunch of numbers that become meaningless as too hard to read?
 

theDBguy

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Hi. Just a though but have you considered using charts or bar graphs?
 

June7

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Graphs can be very helpful in analyzing data. But if you also want to provide tabular data, review http://allenbrowne.com/ser-67.html

Building stable report based on CROSSTAB is tricky but can be done.
 

Micron

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Perth, the most isolated capital in the world
Ended my Australian/New Zealand cruise in Perth (best vacation EVER). Regrettably was only able to spend 1 day there but got to see some interesting sites nonetheless.
 

dynamictiger

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Its not bad place to live. I migrated here from Auckland in 1994. It was as though I stepped on the Tardis and flew back 10 years. The Perth I arrived in was almost quaint with service stations not open Sundays, shops only trading Monday to Friday and so on. I was stunned.
 

dynamictiger

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Good luck and please let us know how it goes.

I found an online example I think will work nicely. More or less I am planning to show columns of numbers:

Pool Average This Month Last Month

Consumption levels are what we are looking at. I considered charts but thought I would need a lot and after a while they would become meaningless. Based on the example I saw I am thinking I use conditional formatting and highlight in a traffic light system according to variations in consumption. I think this achieves the objective and gives a clear simple report with minimal pages.

Thanks for the suggestions though if it wasn't for them I wouldn't have got to where I am.
 

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