Pure text report

  • Thread starter Thread starter Robert D. Young
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R

Robert D. Young

Maybe I'm getting old and lazy, and maybe I'm missing something obvious, but
I was doing a quick-and-dirty addition to a system I have and used a report
to format the results of a query into a single text string (like [field1] &
"some buncha text" & [field2], etc.) and found I ran into two issues:

1. How can a make a report of infinite width? I only want to write one line
per row of the query result, and I can format it OK, but the resulting
report is always bound by the paper width (landscape or portrait). I've
thought of adding some customized paper layout to my printer def, but I
really didn't want to mess with it because I don't really want to ever print
the report, I just intend to export it to a file, which leads to problem 2:

2. Is there a better way to export a report as pure text than printing to a
text printer? While this works, because of the aforementioned page width
issue, I get line breaks in the text as it wraps to each new line.

I suppose I could just change the query to return a single composite field
that looks just like the report line and then export that result, but I
thought I'd ask to see if I was missing something obvious...

Thanks in advance,

- Robert
 
I suppose I could just change the query to return a single composite field
that looks just like the report line and then export that result, but I
thought I'd ask to see if I was missing something obvious...
Click to expand...

yes...the above sounds good to me. Don't try and use a report for a text
export....

Simply use a query..and export that. You can make a export spec..and have
the output as comma delimited, or even fixed length for each field if you
want. Once you get the query, and the export spec setup..then you can run
the whole mess via transfertext (check it out in the help).

And...in fact..if you want more control...you can even write code to
directly output text to a file...but I would try the transfertext approach
first...
 
Thanks. The problem I'm running into with the export of the query is
similar: How to get a text single field exported that's larger than 255
characters? When I compose the text in the query, the on-screen display is
fine (i.e., if I crawl to the left through the display, I can see all, say
350 characters), but when I export I get only the first 255. If I choose a
fixed width export, the width I select is padded out from 256 to the end of
the selected record size with blanks...

I'll look into the transfertext stuff when I get around to changing the code
of the system, but for now I'll keep trying a non-programmatic solution...

- Robert
 
Hi Rebert,

From your descriptions, I understood that you would like to query export
more than 255 characters in a single text fields. If there is anything I
misunderstood, please feel free to let me know :)

Based on my knowledge, you could have a look at the following documents,
which will show you how to eliminate this kind of limitations, which is by
design
ACC: Exported Query Expression Truncated at 255 Characters
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=178743

ACC2000: Exported Query Expression Truncated at 255 Characters
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=207668


Hope this helps and if you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate
to let me know. We are here to be of assistance!

Sincerely yours,

Michael Cheng
Microsoft Online Support
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Thanks, that works but it was actually easier just to break the expression
into multiple fields and export the query with a space between fields...

- Robert
 
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