the Manx Man's MS Access Pages
to subscribe - click here

Creating a Report Snapshot (025)

In the last 2 articles, we discussed using an Excel workbook to distribute reports to people without Access. This article discusses another method - the Microsoft Report Snapshots.

Creating the report snapshot is very easy in VBA.

'-----------------------------------------------------
DoCmd.OutPutTo acOutputReport,"name of the access report", _
acFormatSNP, "name of the snapshot file", True
-----------------------------------------------------

The name of the access report refers to a saved, tested, report design. The name of the snapshot file must include path information, and the extension should be .snp. Leave the name out (just 2 commas in a row) and you will be prompted for the file name. Just remember to put the .snp extension on when prompted. The True will fire up the snapshot viewer afterwards, so you can be sure all worked properly. Change the True to False and it will not fire up the viewer.

Which brings us to the snapshot viewer. On my machine's installation of Access 2000, the snapshot viewer was automatically put onto my system. If yours did not, and of course for your intended recipients who do not even have Access, you can download the viewer from the Microsoft site. Try this address:

http://www.microsoft.com/accessdev/articles/snapshot.htm

The above web page also has documentation, including two great examples of how you can use this capability in real life applications.