Keep Titles And Data Together in Access Reports
If you run large reports, you’ve probably run into a problem where the
title of a group or subgroup appears all by itself at the bottom of a page,
and the data associated with it appears
without a title on the next page. It looks really stupid and
makes the report very hard to read. The ability to keep titles and text
together in Microsoft Word is called Widow and Orphan control. In Access
reports it’s called Keep Together.
In report design view, you can click on the Sorting and Grouping Icon
below circled in yellow, or you can right-click anywhere on the report and
choose Sorting and Grouping from the pop-up menu. You should see the dialog
box below.
Choose the section you’d like to modify (in the picture above we’re
changing the Owner section) and then go to the Keep Together section circled
in red. The Whole Group setting will attempt to put the title and all of the
associated data on one page, the With First Detail setting will put one or
two lines of data on the same page as the title, and the rest on the next
page.
Do be careful with this! While it’s nice to have all of your data
display together, a simple innocent change like the one above can turn a 30
page report into a 100 page report! Consider for a moment how this setting
works:
- You keep a title with the whole dataset
by placing the title at the top of the page
- You keep the title at the top of the page
by inserting a Page Break at the bottom of each section
- More Page Breaks = more white space (wasted space) at
the bottom of each page
- More white/wasted space per page =
more pages!
It’s not unusual to double or triple the size of your reports by using
the Whole Group setting, so do a Print Preview first!
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