[AccessD] Report Printing Problem - Graphs Being Split

Hi Folks.

I've been a "lurker" here for some time now - and have benefited enormously
from the knowledge shared in AccessD. Please accept my thanks for the effort
each and everyone of you puts into this list.

I'm still trying to find a question I can help with - although by the time I
get to see the questions they have generally been answered!

I have a problem with Access reports. Let me describe the scenario, starting
with a little of my background.

I've spent 30 or so years in the IT industry and have worked across just
about all disciplines - but focussed mainly on development, testing and
deployment. My knowledge base extends across Cobol, Fortran (in the early
days of mainframe apps) to VB (from it's first release) and of course Access
and VBA (also from the first releases). I currently do volunteer work with a
Not For Profit organisation here in Australia. I enjoy that immensely and it
keeps my IT skills up to date.

Now for the problem! (I hope my description is a little clearer than mud,
but it is difficult to describe)

The NFP organisation is required to report against a set of Key Performance
Indicators determined by a Gov't Department which provides a good deal of
their funding. The KPIs and the reporting format are fixed and can't be
changed except by the Gov't. I have developed an Access app (Access 2002)
that manages the counselling services provided by the NFPO and includes all
of the data (in a raw form) required for reporting KPIs.

The reporting includes both textual and graphic formatting which is where I
am having difficulty. The textual reporting as well as the graphs are
sub-reports - and they individually do exactly as I want them to do. The
sub-reports are just a series of independent sub-reports placed in the
detail section of the main report.

I have broken the reporting into separate reports simply because there are
way too many sub-reports to fit into one Access report. Within each report,
there is a mixture of textual sub-reports and graphical sub-reports. Most
textual sub-reports have a predictable maximum length (in terms of report
lines) but some depend on the number of records being reported and therefore
are unpredictable in terms of length. The graphs are also predictable in
terms of maximum length. The total number of sub-reports is around 130 split
over 12 main reports.

Each sub-report, including the graphs, is being handled for "no data"
conditions and that works well.

I have also provided the NFPO with the means of hiding any combination of
sub-reports in any report (their requirement). BTW, when a sub-report is
hidden I programmatically move all following report elements (sub-reports
and labels) up to use the space vacated by the hidden elements.

When a report is printed, any textual or graphical sub-report which starts
before the end of the page is "split" i.e.. part of it prints on the page it
started on and the rest prints on the following page. This is particularly
horrific when a graph is being printed - the "pie" ends up not only sliced
but also severed! I think I can live with textual type reports being split
across pages, but splitting a graph into 2 parts isn't acceptable.

Manually placing page breaks in each section can fix this, but given the
varying height of each sub-report plus the fact that any sub-report may be
hidden and therefore not print at all, even manually placing page breaks is
a difficult task.

I suspect the problem lies in the height of the Detail Section of each main
report - it can be as high as 52cms when zero height sub-reports are placed
on it along with some labels, and that extends to much higher physically at
print time (graphs are typically 11cms high). I simply don't know how to fix
this printing problem without significant manual intervention in the
printing process.

Can anyone help?


Thanks in anticipation,


Mike Robertson

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