What would people recommend? Form or Report?

[wmphoto]

I have a database where I store all the information about my clients, commissions, invoices, etc and I intend to use it to produce documents such as contracts, invoices etc from the data I have entered.

Right now I've a couple of invoices to produce and as I see it I have two options, create a report or create a form. (I suppose mail-merge could be a third option, but I want to include subreports/forms which list the commissions the invoice covers and I'm not sure if you can do this with a mail-merge, also I would prefer to keep as much as possible in-database).

The invoices are records in a table, Invoices, though the table is based on a query which just selects those invoices which are to be printed using this form/report and brings in other data such as the client's details from that table.

A report seems to offer better layout options, a print-preview etc but each invoice would be a page within a single big report containing all the invoices, which doesn't seem like the most efficient way to do it, finding and selecting individual pages to print out from the report when I get to the point where I have many invoices.

A form would allow me to more easily select which invoice I want to print out, I could use a split form with a list of invoices down the side, but then arranging a layout for printing seems a bit more awkward that way.

Which method would you use in this situation?

Thanks.

 

[pbaldy]

In general forms are for interacting with data and reports are for presenting it. Therefore, I'd probably have both; a form for entering/editing invoices and a report for previewing/printing them. You can easily restrict the report to a particular invoice with this technique, among others:

http://www.baldyweb.com/wherecondition.htm

 

[wmphoto]

OK, I might go with the report then. I don't need to enter/edit data as I already have a form for this. For now, with just two invoices the it won't matter so much that I have to select the page number I want to print out for each invoice, as I get more I can work with your technique to easily access the report for whchever invoice I want to see/print.