Unit 12. Reports (V).

Printing a report

Printing a report can be done in various ways.

Printing directly

If we are in the Database window:

Select the Report tab.

Click on the name of the report that we want to print to select it.

We click on the button on the toolbar, the report is sent directly to the printer. In this case all of the pages in the document will be printed with the options defined at that moment.

Before sending the printing to the document it is convenient to check the defined options at that moment, and for this we need to open the Print dialogue box.

Opening the Print dialogue box

If we are in the Database window:

Select the Report tab.

Click on the name of the report that we want to print to select it.

If we drop down the File menu and select the Print... option the Print dialogue box will open in which you can change some of the parametres in the printing as we will explain to you next:

If we have various printers connected to the computer (as we often do when they are network printers), dropping down the Name: combo box we can select the printer to which we want to send the printing.

In the Print Range section we can specify whether we want to print the whole report (All) or just a few pages.

If we only want to print a few pages we can specify the inicial page of the interval to print in the from: box, and in the To: box specify the final page.

If we have records selected when we open the dialogue box we can select the Selected Record(s) option to print only these records.

In the Copies section we can specify the Number of Copies: to print. If the Collate option is not selected then it will print a full copy and after that another copy, while if we activate the Collate option it will print the copies of each page together.

The Print to File option allows us to send the result of the printing to a file in the hard drive instead of sending it to the printer.

With the Properties button we can access the printer properties window, this window will change depending on the model printer we have, but will allow us to define the type of printing e.g in colour or black and white, in high quality or draft copy, the type of paper we use, etc...

With the Setup ... button we can configure the page, change the margins, print various columns, etc...

And lastly we click on the OK button and the printer will start. If we close the window without accepting nothing will be printed.

Opening a report in Previous view.

To check whether the printing will come out well it is convenient to open the report previously on the screen to check if it is ok to go ahead and send it to the printer. To open a report in preview from the Database window we need to follow these steps:

With the Reports object selected, click on the name of the report to select it.

Next we click on the button and the report preview will open.

The Preview window

In this window we see the report in the way that it will be printed.

To pass over the various pages we have a scroll bar in the lower part of the screen with the buttons that we know already to go to the first page, to the next page, to a specific page, to the previous page or to the last page.

At the top we have a toolbar with buttons that are already familiar to us:

to go to design view, to send the report to the printer, to go to the Database window, to create a new object, and to access help.

the magnifying glass allows us to draw near or draw away from the report

allows us to visualize a whole page on the screen,

reduces the size of the report in order to see two pages of the report on the same screen.

allows us to see up to six pages on the screen at the same time.

adjusts the size so that a whole page can be seen on the screen, and if we drop down the menu we can select a zoom porcentage to see the page closer or further, it has the same function as the magnifying glass but allows more sizes.

opens the Page setup window where we can change the margins, the orientation of the paper, etc...

sends the report to a Word document, dropping down the box we can select to send it to various Microsoft applications, Excel for example.

will close the preview without sending the report to the printer.

To practice these operations you can perform the Step by step exercise in printing reports.

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