Working with report elements on the Design tab

1. Each of the default report areas contains a single section. To add additional sections, click Section Expert on the Standard toolbar and use the Section Expert to add the desired sections.

   Once you have added sections to an area, you can move, merge, and delete them in the Section Expert. See Using guidelines.

2. To turn the grid on and off, choose the Options command from the File menu and select or clear the Show Grid in Design check box in the Options dialog box when it appears. See Using the grid.
3. If you are working with the grid off and you want to use snap-to guidelines for positioning objects, click the top or left ruler wherever you want guidelines to appear.

   Some further ways you can use guidelines:

   • drag a field to a guideline until it snaps to the guideline
   • drag the guideline arrow to move the guideline (and any objects that are snapped to it)
   • drag the guideline arrow away from the ruler to remove the guideline. See Using guidelines.
4. If the Field Explorer dialog box is not visible, click Insert Fields on the Standard toolbar.

   The Field Explorer dialog box appears with Database Fields selected. Expand the active database table(s) to display a list of fields. To speed the entry of multiple fields, this box will remain on-screen until you click Close. This dialog box can be moved to a new location or resized, if you wish. See Placing data on the report.

5. Select the field(s) you want to appear on the report.

   You can select and place them one at a time, or use the Shift-click combination to select a number of contiguous fields, or the Ctrl-click combination to select fields from the list at random. Drag and drop is also active. Place the fields in the Details section where you want them to appear.

   When you place multiple fields, they appear in the same order that they appear in the Field Explorer dialog box. The program marks the position of each field with a rectangular frame. The characters in the frame indicate whether the field is text (xxx...), number (555...), currency ($555...), date (12/31/99), time (00:00:00), datetime (12/31/99 00:00:00), or Boolean
   (T/F).

   Note:    

   • The field names and field types can be viewed by selecting the Show Field Names check box on in the Options dialog box (Layout tab).
   • The program automatically places field titles in the Page Header section unless the Insert Detail Field Titles check box is not selected in the Options dialog box (Layout tab).
   • If additional Details sections are added to the report, field titles will only be placed in the Page Header section for fields in the Details A (the original) section of your report.
6. Once the objects are in place, you may want to adjust the report sections. To do this, right-click the shaded area to the left of the section ruler and use the shortcut menu that appears:
   • to expand a section to accommodate an additional line, choose the Insert Line command
   • to have the program automatically align the objects in the section horizontally, choose the Arrange Lines command
   • to reduce the size of a section to eliminate unnecessary white space above and below objects, choose the Fit Section command. See Using white space between rows.
7. To create a report title, you must first enter the title in the Document Properties dialog box. On the File menu, click Summary Info. Enter a title in the Title text box of the Document Properties dialog box. Click OK.
8. Choose Report Title from the Special Fields list in the Field Explorer. A rectangular placement frame appears when you move the cursor over your report. Click once in the Report Header (RH) section to place the report title. The report title field contains the text that you typed in the Title text box of the Document Properties dialog box. See Adding a title page to the report.
9. To see how the results will print, click Print Preview on the Standard toolbar.

   To speed processing time while building a report, you can preview the report using only a small subset of the available data. To do this, go to the File menu, point to Print and then click Preview Sample. See Preview tab.

   In either case, the program takes you to the Preview tab. You can fine-tune a report in the Preview tab while viewing the results as actual report data. You can also close the Preview tab and continue working on the report in the Design tab.