A report created in Access 2003 typically summarizes and organizes information. When designing a report, consider the point you are trying to make, the intended audience, and the level of information they will need.

You can use a wizard to create a report, or you can create one from scratch. Once the report is created, you can switch back and forth between Design view and Print Preview to refine your report.

You can create a main report that serves as a shell for one or more subreports.

To your report and/or subreport, you can add controls and set the properties of the controls. You can display information from one or more records from one or more tables or queries, and you can have multiple sets of headers and footers.

If your report needs summary calculations or statistics, you can use a query as the basis for the report. You can enhance the usefulness of a report or subreport by performing calculations in the reports themselves. You can use the Expression Builder to create the expressions that tell Access what and how to calculate.

Print Preview lets you check reports before printing them. The Layout Preview option displays only enough of the report to show all the elements. It’s shorter, prints faster, and gives just enough information to help you refine the layout.