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Access gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to formatting a report. You can use
any fonts and colors that you want, you can change the theme, and you can even add a header,
footer, and company logo.
In this example, I'd like to start out by changing the fonts. And I want to put the
descriptions in italics, and make the product names bold. To do this, we'll need to be in
Layout view.
First, select the column that you want to change. You can also hold down the SHIFT key
if you want to select multiple columns.
Then go to the Format tab… and choose the font that you want. I'm going to pick Cambria.
Now to make the descriptions italic, I'll select them… and click the Italic command.
And then I'll select the product type and make it bold.
I think I'll go ahead and delete the field headers. Anybody who sees this menu will know
what each column is, so they don't really need to be labeled.
At this point, we can switch to Print Preview to see how it looks.
The new font and the italics really help to give it a more distinctive look.
Now I'd like to add a page header, which will include the address of our bakery. To do this
we'll need to go into Design view, which we haven't looked at yet.
Here, you can make some of the same types of adjustments you can make in Layout view,
but it also lets you do some other things like adding Headers and Footers.
You'll see several gray bars… and find the one that says Page Header.
You'll need to make sure that there's some empty space below it, and if there isn't any
space, then you'll need to click on this border, and drag it down.
Then, in the Design tab, find the Controls group… and you'll want to click on this
icon, which is the Label command.
And then in your page header, click and drag to create a box.
You can type whatever you want here… and I'm going to type our bakery's address, phone
number, and email address.
And if you want, you can also edit the Report Header, Page Footer, and Report Footer in
the same way.
Let's go back to Print Preview to see how our header looks.
I think it looks good, so I'm not going to change anything.
Now if you scroll down, you can see that today's date and the page number are in the page footer.
These were automatically added for us because we created this report with the Report Wizard.
However, you can also add them manually by going to either Layout view or Design view…
and then clicking Page Numbers or Date and Time on the Design tab.
Now one thing that will make this report look much more complete is a company logo. So I'll
click the Logo command… and then you can select the picture that you want… and then
click OK.
Okay, now this may be hard to see, but our logo has been added in the Report Header,
and it has an orange box around it.
I'm just going to drag this corner to make it larger… and then I'll move it over to
the center of the page.
I'll also move the title to the center. And I think this title would look better if it
just said Menu.
And finally, you can change the overall look of your report by selecting a different theme.
A theme is a set of colors and fonts that applies to your entire database. And that
means it can effect your other objects as well.
If you want, you can even mix and match colors and fonts from different themes.
All of these little details that we've added to our report make a big difference, and now
it actually looks like real menu that we can print and give to our customers.