Hi All,

I wasn't really sure where to put this so I put it in the most general section.

I have a set of queries to produce a couple of reports to excel (not access reports) that are all fairly complicated. The easy way to explain is that I have a union of 6 cross tabs that are based on summaries of unions (in some cases) that are based on further unions. Just trying to explain it makes my head hurt a bit.

The reason for this somewhat complicated structure is that the base data is as generic as required, and each level gets more specific and aggregates the level below. This is also complicated because the systems it is reporting on all do things slightly differently so each of the 3 systems have their own base queries that are all similar.

I am not sure I am explaining this really well but my request has to do with that failing. How do people document complicated query hierarchies? I have tried to do this in word and excel so far, and well while I can see which query feeds which, it seems to lose something in the translation no matter what I do. The thing is, it is starting to get so complicated that even I am getting confused about which data set is feeding which particular number. If I am confused, anyone else would most likely be hopelessly lost despite my somewhat rigid naming conventions.

Thanks for any help or advice anyone can give.

Regards
Kat

Kat,

You can use the Documenter (Tools => Analyze) in Access to capture the query syntax. Depending on what you have at your disposal, you could use additional applications (Visio, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) to further elaborate on each query (if you so choose).


HTH,


AvgJoe

Thanks Joe,

I had forgotten about the in-built Documenter. Unfortunately, I've probably not explained myself well again as part of my question is what do people do their documentation in (as the documenter will only give the syntax not the whys and wherefores) and I have attempted to do both a limited version of the syntax and the whys and wherefores in both excel and word with little success other than what looks just as confusing as what I started with.

Kat

Kat,

I did see where the Documenter allows you to publish the output to Word or Excel. I trust that there's third-party software that will print all the "whys" and "wherefores" you're looking for. If you publish the results in Word, you can insert textboxes into the Word document and then paste screen prints into those textboxes. Additionally, you can use the Drawing toolbar to add more annotations to the document.

HTH,


AvgJoe