Designing reports in Access is similar to designing forms. Using Design view, you have a template laid out before you in which you can drag and drop different objects. Let’s visualize this example by making a simple list of all customers in the Northwind sample database.

 

 

The simple empty report contains a header, footer, and body (detail). The table or query the report is based on is visible, as well as the Toolbox containing the different objects that can be added to a report. To make our mailing list, we will drag the fields Company Name, Address, City, Country, and Postal Code to the body of the report:

 

 

That’s all that is needed to create the most basic of reports! Reports can be viewed in two ways using Access: Design view and Print Preview. Click View à Print Preview to see the Report.

If you decide that you only want a city and country listing for each company, removing the unwanted objects is as easy as clicking an object and pressing Delete on your keyboard. In the diagram above, notice that the PostalCode text box is currently highlighted, while the Postal Code label has a single black box attached to it. This shows you that it corresponds to the text box. Delete the Postal Code and Address objects:

 

 

You can now adjust the positions of the other objects, simply click an object to highlight it and drag the large black box in the upper-left corner of the object to move it.