Muli-Option MS Access Reports - database

Question

I am very new to MS Access and yet have been working (loosely) on a DB for a while. We have a DB that tracks membership. There is a table with all of the member info in there. When new and current customers are added, or pay for the current year, the info is applied to a 'PaidYear' column. For years now, I have been adding a query listing the current years' members and adding a report that displays the output of the query.
I would like to create a report where I could (using a drop-down maybe) select the active year and other options such as City, Company Name, Phone Number, etc. Is there any way to simply set this up? It has to be easy enough for my replacements to intuitively use. ie:
Member Report for [Choose Year] <-- Dropdown
[City] [Company] [Phone] [Select Option]<--- Extra Options for reporting
I have been playing with it for a while and while I can get the design set up, I can't set up the functionality. Thank you so much!!!

Answer 1

Yup, if you want to filter down your report, you can write a little bit of VBA to open your report with a filter (you don't need to use a parameter query for this. It may be more efficient to do this at the query execution level, but as far as i've noticed, the performance is the same to just run the full query and filter it at runtime of the report open (Access might actually just do this behind the scenes, again, I don't really know.
Anyways, lets get to it. Here's a code snippet that you can kind of use as a starting point and adapt.
Create a button that says 'Run Report', let's call it cmdRunReport
In the On Click event for that button, you will put some code. I'm just writing this up now, so I might have some syntax errors (don't have Access on this PC).
dim multiple as boolean
dim filtering as string
filtering = ""
if me.yearDropdown is not null then
filtering = filtering + "[myYearField] = " & me.yearDropdown
multiple = true
end if
if me.cityDroPDown is not null then
if multiple then
filtering = filtering + "AND [myCityField] = '" & me.cityDropdown & "'"
else
filtering = filtering + " [myCityField] = '" & me.cityDropdown & "'"
set multiple = true
end if
end if
if me.CompanyDropDown is not null then
if multiple then
filtering = filtering + "AND [myCompanyField] = '" & me.CompanyDropdown & "'"
else
filtering = filtering + " [myCompanyField] = '" & me.CompanyDropdown & "'"
set multiple = true
end if
end if
DoCmd.OpenReport "yourReport", acViewPreview, , filtering
This is the basis of what you can do. I may have a couple if syntax errors and concatenated the filtering string incorrectly (untested), but that's where you could start.
In english, it just looks at your form's dropdowns that you use to filter. It checks if they are not null, and then concatenates their values into the "filtering" string. This string is used as a parameter in your OpenReport method.
Hope this helps.