Access Charts
You can create charts in Access either as forms or reports. If you plan
to just display the chart, placing the chart object on a form is an easy
way to display it. For printout, placing the chart object on a report is
the desired method.
Charting in Access is somewhat limited and a bit cumbersome. It's so
easy to export Access data into Excel using the Office Links
functionality that most people move their data into Excel and chart it
from there.
But what if you have an application that just shows a simple chart and
users who
don't want to move the data into Excel? It
is
awfully convenient to show a graph right there in your database
application...
Go to the Forms section of the main database window. Don't use the
Create form in Design View
or the Create form by using
wizard. Up at the top circled in blue in the picture below is the New
button. This opens up a different set of wizards you may not be used to.
Choose the Chart Wizard line below, and then choose the table or query
where your data will come from.
You have a reasonable selection of chart types to choose from, but it
isn't Excel. There are bar charts, line graphs, pie charts and
scattergrams as you can see in the graphic below.
After you choose the type of chart to make, you have some options on how
to display the data from the table or query you chose in the prior step.
If your data contains date fields, you will see that Access tries to
group your data by month. You don't have to use this grouping though.
Double-click on the label "Date by Month" and you'll see the dialog box
above. From here you can choose to group by year, quarter, month, etc.
The grouping is a little forced in that the dates are converted to
strings and then grouped by the string. You will probably want to do
your grouping in the query before you run the chart wizard.
Be careful though - for any but the smallest of datasets, you will need
to group data. You'll quickly run out allowed columns in the resultant
query that the chart is based on, so you'll have to group or filter your
data somehow.
You're basically finished. You can display the form with the chart or
choose to go in and edit the chart by changing the fonts, number
formats, etc. Then add this form into your switchboard or main
application form so that your users can select it from a menu.
Note that you can also create charts in a report following nearly
identical steps. Good luck!