Deb, I can relate to the general tone of your last post ... I came into
Access with no prior db experience, and Excel with only limited exposure
to spreadsheets. I had considerable programming experience several years
ago, but nothing recently ... so the need to learn both has been
interesting, to say the least.
While I'm still unclear as to what precisely you are asking I'm going to
guess that what you find particularly loathsome about Access reports is
the fact that you are in effect drawing on a real piece of paper and you
do not have the magic zoom capability that Excel gives you.
I found that once I realized that particular detail designing Access
reports became much easier. My technique, if I'm designing a report
layout of much complexity at all, is to create a mockup-up in Excel ...
when I have a printed copy that I'm happy with I get a ruler to get the
locations of everything and build the Access report *to exact scale*.
It took some getting used to, but once I figured that out generating
pre-populated printed forms became much easier.
If I'm interpreting your posts correctly, I think this is the answer to
your question.
Aside: "Form" in Access (MS Office itself, for that matter) is a
technical term that does not necessarily correlate to what you and I
normally think of when we are thinking of a printed form --- keeping
that in mind when posting to an Access forum / newsgroup will likely
save a lot of confusion.