Header and Footer Sections in Access Report

You can work with the sections that the wizard creates quite easily. As you have already learned, working with controls is the same no matter what section they are in. If you need to move a control from one section to another, use the cut and paste feature.

• Changing the size of Section:
  To change the size of a section move the cursor to the top edge of the gray bar that marks the bottom of the section. Click and drag that bar up or down to change the size of the section. Access will not let you make the section smaller than it needs to be to fit all the controls in their current position, so if you cannot make the section as small as you want, you may need to move some controls.
• Adding and removing Sections:
  The easiest sections to add or remove are the Page and Report Headers and Footers. You can easily add or remove them from your report by choosing the View>>Page Header/Footer and View> Report Header/Footer from the menu.

The secret to mastering Design view is understanding its five different sections.
Although you can leave some sections blank, every report includes them in exactly the same order:

1. Report Header: This section appears once at the beginning of your report, on the first page. This section is where you add titles, logos, and your own personal byline.
2. Page Header: This section appears just under the report header on the first page, and at the top of each subsequent page. It is the place to add page numbers, and you can also use it for column headers in simple, tabular reports like the product catalog.
3. Detail: This section appears once immediately after the page header, and it is the heart of all reports. The trick is that the Detail section is repeated once for each record in your report. In a simple tabular report, this section represents a single row.
4. Page Footer: This section appears at the bottom of each page. If you do not use the page header for page numbers, then this section provides your other option.
5. Report Footer: This section appears once at the very end of the report. You can use it to print summary information, copyright statements, the date of printing.
   The content in these sections looks a fair bit different from what you see in other views, because Design view does not show the live data. Instead, it includes placeholders where Access can insert the necessary information each time it runs the report. When you run the product report, Access grabs the values from the ProductCategory: ID, ProductName, Price, and Description fields and then shuffles them into the matching boxes.

You will need a bit of time before you are comfortable manipulating the content in Design view. First, you need to learn that you can adjust the size of each section. This ability makes sense, because different reports allocate different amounts of space to each region.
In the next lesson, create a calculated control.

In this exercise, use header and footer sections to refine a report.
Working with Sections - Exercise