MS Access report margin bleedover, fit to width?

Question

After a Citrix upgrade, all my MS Access reports appear slightly bigger and several of them bleed over the margins into additional pages where a sliver hangs over.

It is not feasible for me to go through each report and manually resize everything in Design View -- several of them have already been compressed quite tightly. Is there no way to "fit to width"?

Answer 1

There is indeed a "Fit to Page" property.

Report properties -> Format Tab -> Fit to Page -> Yes

It is in my experience that I'm going to say that this probably won't be the universal fix you're looking for, and it might not even work. On reports that have bled over, I had to manually adjust each report. Of course I noticed this as I was developing them so it was not as time-consuming if I had to do 20 within a week, per se.

There are a decent amount of properties you can toy with, including Page Width, Auto Center, Auto Resize, etc.

Formatting can get very tedious. I'm hoping the default properties will work for you, but keep in mind that a manual fix may be required.

Answer 2

I believe your problem is related to the printer driver. Microsoft Access reports are constrained by the capabilities (printable area) of the printer driver assigned to them (either the default printer, or a specific printer, if chosen).

The unprintable margins of your printer, as defined by your printer driver affect how your Access report pages will be laid out when previewing or printing.

For example, if you have your default printer driver set to a laser printer, you can usually design a report with 0.25 inch margins on all four sides (top, bottom, left right). For this example, lets design a report that fills the page with 0.25 inch margins, and only takes one page.

Then, if you change your default printer to an inkjet and open the same report, you may find that the report is now wider and/or longer than one page. The reason is that in many cases, an inkjet printer has wider minimum left and right and/or top and bottom margins. Some inkjet printers can't print closer than 0.6 inches from the bottom of the page. So, your report which fit with 0.25 inch margins now is wider or taller than one page because the printer driver settings will take precedence over your report margins.

Unfortunately, with Microsoft Access, there is not a true "fit to page" feature, like Excel. I wish there were.

I would imagine that your printer driver has possibly been changed or upgraded and now has a narrower printable width. (i.e. previously the minimum left and right margins were 0.20 and now the minimum left and right margins are 0.25)

If you open a report in design view, then go to the Page Setup, set all of the margins to 0. As you type the "0" and exit each field, you will see Access change the 0 inch margin to the minimum allowed value for the current printer.

Unfortunately, the best advice I can give you is to design your reports with the margins of your "least capable" printer. The safest margins are usually no less than 0.3 inches for left and right, and no less than 0.5 inches top, and 0.6 inches bottom (to accommodate most inkjet printers).

You will probably have to manually edit each report in design view in order to fix them, OR change the printer driver.

Answer 3

I noticed that nobody addressed that your project is using MS Access on Citrix which is essentially a remote connection to a computer that users share (aka Terminal Server). As I recall there are special Office installation files that are required when installing Office on a terminal server. In part, the installer addresses how video and print drivers are used. I found this to apply to both displaying Forms and printing Reports. For Forms, in the end I had to apply finishing layout touches via the remote connection so that the video drivers metrics were saved with the form. For reports, there were two issues: The first is making sure that each report is set to use the 'Default Printer'. There is code available to walk the reports and set each to the Default Printer. The second was again finalizing each report's layout using the remote connection and the default printer installed on the remote connection. However the workaround to this is to install an local generic printer driver (aka an basic Epson Dot Matrix driver) and final each report for that printer. When deployed most modern printers understand the metrics of the basic printer driver. Note that code could be used to walk the list of reports, open in design mode, change a setting and the Default Printer then save. This could be enough to reset each report's configuration to match a Citrix or Terminal Server deployment.

I hope this helps!

Ken Developing MS Access custom applications since Version 1.0 - Our first version had a box's serial number of 0000071 which we acquired as a give-away during the launch at Comdex Las Vegas.