Access Report Design – Cluttered Controls – Can Grow & Can Shrink

Here’s a quick tip with regards to report, and to a lesser extent, form design. Many times when you’re design Ms Access reports, often you will come across spatial problems, where you simply trying to fit too many controls (usually textboxes) on a report – even when you’re designing in landscape mode.

Two extremely handy TEXT-BOX properties are the CAN GROW and CAN SHRINK property. By setting these properties to YES on a text-box, these will tell a text book to grow and shrink vertically with regards to the the size of the data that they are displaying. This means that the report will add extra vertical space for the control on the detail section of report, without upsetting any other controls that may sit adjacent to the particular control.

In my experience, these two properties can save the developer a lot of time and grief when trying to set out a report in a neat and readable fashion.