Reporting for Duty

If you've been following this series, you're quickly becoming a database pro. You've learned the basics of just about everything Base offers. The last step is to throw all that data into a usable report that can be printed and used. This article will show you how to do just that.

The Scenario

Before we get started, let's review our scenario: You're the IT director for a company with several employees, and you have a lot of hardware to monitor. You're building an inventory database to help manage and track the printers, laptops, desktops, scanners, fax machines and other important equipment floating around the office. You've created at least one great form in which an intern or secretary can enter employee names and the products each employee is using, as well as all the pertinent data about those products. You've run a few queries—some simple, others more complex—and now you're ready to distribute the data in a report.

Static and Dynamic Reports

First decide what kind of report you want: static or dynamic. A static report uses—and will always use—the data you have right now; the data used will not change over time. For example, static reports are good for printing out a list of employees with their phone extensions and the departments in which they work.

A dynamic report accesses the original data source (a query or table) and updates the data each time you run the report. This kind of report is helpful in generating a list of inventory purchases, for example. You could run the report quarterly so new purchases are added to the list before distributing the updates. You could also use a dynamic report to print out a quarterly cost analysis: each quarter you would use the Dollars Spent by Employees query to run a report. Save each newly generated report, and at the end of the year you could see just how much was spent each quarter in each department. You could even create a new query that spits out the total dollar amount spent in all departments and run a quarterly report based on that.

Creating a Simple Report with the Wizard

For our purposes today, we'll start with a simple static report. First, note that a report can be based on only one table or query. If your report needs to include data from two or more different tables, first create a query to combine the fields, then use that query as the basis of your report. This means you might find yourself creating new queries or combining old queries to get the right information for your report. Here's how you'd create your first simple report:

1. Open the database.
2. Click the Reports icon in the left column.
3. Choose Use Wizard to Create Report. A generic report will open in the background, with the Report Wizard window displaying on top.
4. Our report is going to list the names, departments and phone extensions of each employee. We'll select the Basic Employee Details table from the Tables or Queries drop-down field.
5. Select each field in the Available fields list that you would like to include in the report and use the arrow to move them to the Fields in Report list, then click Next.