Which report/form/query is best?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Julia Boswell
  • Start date Start date
J

Julia Boswell

Hi all,

I've got a lot of experience using Access but am new to crosstab and pivots
and I'm really stuck and don't know how to proceed (despite reading
everything in Help!). I haven't posted on reports, queries or forms, as I'm
not sure which one is relevant.

Here's the problem - I want user defined criteria based crosstab queries
(i.e. users open a form a select how they want the report to run), but I
don't want it to run as a query as I want totalling & formatting etc, so
want to create a report. However I can't seem to work out how to create the
report as, the column headings could differ (i.e. the column headings are
months, therefore one user could choose June-August and another could choose
Jan-Dec).

I've toyed with pivot tables, but these would be too complicated for our
users (and for me to be honest!!) - I just can't get how to format them
properly.

Basically I don't know how to proceed. Should I use crosstabs and is there a
way of creating reports dynamically based on the user criteria? or should I
be using pivots, if so how?

Thanks in advance.

Julia
 
Thanks for this, I should have said that I'm using 2000 though (the article
applies to 97 and previous).

Also, I'm comfortable changing the column headings in the crosstab query.
Every time the query runs it's based on user defined criteria which works
fine. However it's a report that I can't get to work - how do I get a report
to change column headings?

The query works like this:

Totals of sales (value) in months (column headings) sorted in project order
(row headings). The selection criteria may be for a particular project, for
a particular business for all or just some months.

Therefore the results would be different depending on the selection, e.g.
All projects may have values in all months, but one project may have values
in only one month, therefore the crosstab query results look different (and
this works fine), however when designing the report I only get the option to
add column headings for the query with the current selection criteria.

Does that make sense?

Julia

Thanks

Julia
 
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