Reports in MS Access after compiling into MDE file

I am开发者_StackOverflow currently working on a MS Access 2003 mdb file. This mdb file will be converted to an mde file before being published.

How do I go about enabling the reports function of MS Access after conversion? Is there a alternative (open source or free software) to the reporting in MS Access? Any suggestions?

Assuming you mean getting users to creat their own reports in the same FE MDE? This isn't possible as you can't open a form or report in design view in an MDE.

We suggest you give the power user a separate MDB linked to BE database. Along with some starter queries and tell them to "have fun". Providing occasional support on queries, explaining, for example, the difference between the joins.

Also I give my clients an Export to Excel button which copies the reports recordset to Excel. I do not attempt to use the report itself into Excel as that generally looks terrible.

Another issue is to consider why users want to create reports. I frequently get clients requesting two different reports on the same data, one with details, one just a summary. You can actually make that a single report and hide the detail section to get the summary report.

Also, many clients consider a report with different data but the same layout to be a different report, and what they really need is the ability to filter the report output according to their needs.

In my experience, both of these take care of 90% of the scenarios where users think they need to create reports.