Complicated Report on Gov. Form

[cantwellt]

I have a report that really needs to be produced on a Government form. In the past I have used a high quality scanned version of the form behind a bunch of bound and unbound text boxes. (The unbound ones were filled manually by the user.) Pretty crude huh? <br><br>Now I would like to do this right, but the data is pulled from the database and twisted and turned and manipulated in so may ways it will take a series of crosstab queries and quite a few subreports to do it. This report has 202 label boxes and text boxes and is letter size. All these boxes are connected and the report needs to look enough like the Gov. form that people would not know the difference. Should I try to overprint the report, create the whole report in access, or forget the whole thing for 1 report a month?

 

[aklein]

For <font color=red><b><u>one</u> report a month?</b></font><br><br>Let them crank the paper into a typewriter and fill it out.&nbsp;&nbsp;Your effort in producing a trivial piece of code to do the work will take more time and effort than filling the report out manually for the next 10 years.<br><br>Just produce a report that includes all the information they need to fill in the report, in the same order that it appears on the report.

 

[MichaelRed]

My vote would be to do the form/report.&nbsp;&nbsp;Any &quot;opbject&quot; that needs &gt; 200 fields filled in should NOT be given to human typist.&nbsp;&nbsp;Further, the 'REAL' work is in generating the dataset/record to support the thing, not in the boring/trivial/frustrating ... work in reproducing the &quot;form&quot; look and feel.&nbsp;&nbsp;After all, this is just a series of labels and lines with some occassional strange fonts.<br><br>I have not done this type of work in a couple of years, but many of the U.S. Gov. &quot;Forms&quot; were available from Unc. S. over the internet in a variety of formats, at least two of which made the layout very easy (Word Perfect, and ? Adobe PageMaker ?) where you could just see the location info, font, font size, etc in the privided document.&nbsp;&nbsp;Much more accurately than the scanner approach.<br><br>Most of the Gov. Forms I have done did not require anywhere near the 200+ items of info you are discussing, but I was generally able to &quot;reproduce&quot; the form atthe rate of ~ 2 pages per day, and the dataset to fill them out somewhat faster - probably because so much of hte data was redundant.<br><br>Michael<br>

 

[DreewToo]

Just my .02...how about recreating the report in excel, and using ole to enter the values into the cells.&nbsp;&nbsp;After most of the data is entered, it would be simple enough for a user to complete the entry and print out the report.<br><br>Drew