Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide   

Presenting Data in Office Solutions

Most solutions that manage data include some way of presenting that data in reports. By creating reports, you can turn raw data into usable information.

There are lots of different ways to present data in an Office solution. How you build reports depends on how your solution is designed and where the data is stored. For example, suppose that Access forms the basis for your solution, so that users interact with data through Access forms and data access pages. However, your users may prefer to view and manipulate data in Excel so that they can create custom reports with maximum flexibility. In that case, you may want to export data from Access to Excel. On the other hand, if your data is stored in an Access or SQL Server database but your solution is Excel-based, you probably want to write code in Excel to display the data.

When you design a custom report, you should ask yourself these two questions:

The following sections outline some common approaches for presenting data in an Office solution.