How Report Design Sections Group Data in Access Report

As you have seen, the report design is broken into parts that are called sections. Sections come in pairs around the main section of the report, which is the Detail section.
So, for instance, you saw the following sections in the Hours by Project report:

1. Report Header and Report Footer
2. Page Header and Page Footer
3. Company Header and Company Footer
4. Project ID Header and Project ID Footer
5. Detail

These sections can be categorized into one of four types:

1. Report Header and Footer: Appears at the beginning and end of the report and contains summary information about the entire report.
2. Page Header and Footer: Appears at the top and bottom of each page. Usually contains information such as the name of the report, the date, and the page number.
3. Section Headers and Footers named for fields: Used to group the data in the report and usually contain summary information about each group. These section footers are often used to display summary calculations (subtotals).
4. Detail: Appears in the very middle of the other paired sections. This contains the meat of the report, the data that has been grouped by the field sections.

As you may have already realized, the neat pairing of section headers and footers is only a pattern for your report to follow. The actual report may have many detail sections, since the data is grouped according to similarities. For instance, if you group by Company, then you have a detail section for every company that you have data for.
Although this seems confusing, it is a powerful feature. You may want to look back at your Hours by Project report and compare the sections in Design view to the way that Access organizes the data in report view to see how Access figures out how to build the report.
Learn how to work with sections using the report header and footer, and the page header and footer. All in the next lesson!