General Question: Better looking Reports (1 Viewer)

DeanFran

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I'm no graphic designer, and I'm barely a passable Access database designer, but one thing I'm always disappointed in are the look of my reports. I would very much like to hear ideas on how to make reports more professional looking.
 

CJ_London

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use of graphics and lines spring to mind. Depending on the data use things like pie charts. other than graphs where you need to colours for different datasets, keep colouring simple and light, use grey rather than black.

for fonts, choose a standard one, perhaps show headers in a slightly darker colour and perhaps bold to the data below

Also consider how the report is viewed - printed or screen? and if printed is it going to be a colour or black and white? if screen consider a darker background and lighter text, also avoid horizontal scrolling, so be aware of your users screen sizes.

If you are a company, they often have a standard template for things like powerpoint, so take some ideas from there.

less is more, space things out if you can, don't crowd the data, emphasise the important data, don't give lesser data the same weighting on the report.

Investigate the use of the report property me.line which when used in code can draw a line of a given thickness and colour across all sections (headers, detail, footers etc) - much neater than have textboxes formatted and lined up - great for shading a totals column for example
 

Mark_

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In addition to CJ's recommendations, ask for samples of existing reports that are used in the company. Look for header / footer formats. Often companies will have a certain "Look" that they like.
 

Pat Hartman

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Try for consistency once you settle on a format. Be wary of using too much color. Most people don't have access to color printers and colors don't render well in black and white. White space and indentation are important. You want groupings to be obvious. And finally, ALL reports need to be sorted so don't forget to specify that. Figure out what makes sense for any particular report. Sometimes list type reports need multiple versions. you might want to sort a customer list by CareManager in one case and Customer name in another and even possibly by city. So be prepared to make sorting optional for some "lists".
 

DeanFran

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Yes, color printing is verboten here, so I never use it. All of my reports up to this point are basically lists, so no images, or charts yet. We don't have a formal document format, though we do use a couple informal conventions for some of our documents, so replicating that is something I'm going to look into. Thanks everyone.
 

gandhawk

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I love the use of graphs in my reports. However I like my reports to be functional where can drill down to lower level of detail based a clicked field. For example a client summary report I would drill down to the client details by clicking on the client name and even drill down more base on clicking other info.
 

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