

You can see the header and footer bands for the report, page, and groups. Understand Design viewĭesign view gives you a more detailed view of the structure of your report. In certain situations, Access will display a message telling you that you must switch to Design view to make a particular change. If you want to see how the report will look when printed, use Print Preview.Ĭertain tasks cannot be performed in Layout view, and require you to switch to Design view. However, Layout view gives you a very close approximation of the printed report. Also, if you have used Page Setup for format your report with columns, the columns are not displayed in Layout view. For example, there are no page breaks in Layout view. The report you see in Layout view does not look not exactly the same as the printed report. The following illustration shows a Customer Phone Book report in Layout view. Because you can see the data while you are modifying the report, it's a very useful view for setting column widths, add grouping levels, or performing almost any other task that affects the appearance and readability of the report. However, you can also make changes to the report design in this view. In Layout view, the report is actually running, so you can see your data much as it will appear when printed. Layout view is the most intuitive view to use for report modification, and can be used for nearly all the changes you would want to make to a report in Access. You might end up using both views to make your changes. Your choice of which view to use depends on what specific task you are trying to accomplish. Access provides two views that you can use to make changes to your report: Layout view and Design view.

This topic describes the techniques you can use to modify an existing Access report.
